SOBER 
 
 VANCE 
 THOMPSON 
 
. . LIBRARY . . 
 
 Connecticut 
 Agricultural College. 
 
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 CLASS NO. I- J 6 ..\. 2ir\ 
 
 COST -.8 X' 
 
 DATE D..ei:.,-^4 1 9 l^ 
 
 BOOK 178. T37 c 1 
 
 THOMPSON # DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 3 ^153 a00t,32TM 5 
 
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DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 BY 
 
 VANCE THOMPSON 
 
 Author of "Eat and Grow Thin," '<Thc Ego Book," " French Portraits," 
 "Diplomatic Mysteries," "The Life of Ethelbcrt Ncvin," etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 11916 
 
T-^^ 
 
 Copyright, 1915, by 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 New York 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 I SXB6 
 
 Published October 23, 1915 
 
 Second Printing, November i, 1Q15 
 
 Third Printing, February, 1916 
 
 Fourth Printing, February, 1916 
 
 Fifth Printing, April, 1916 
 
 Sixth Printing, August, 19x6 
 
 Seventh Printing, October, 1916 
 
 THE QUINN A BODEN 00. PRESS 
 RAHWAV, rt. J. 
 
To 
 
 A. PARKER NEVIN 
 
 My hope is that you will approve of this book — both as jurist and 
 sociologist. One thing I know: The intention is so good — the sub- 
 ject is so important — that you will accept the book as a mark of 
 my friendship and admiration. We discussed this subject many 
 times, and because I kept in memory many of the things you said, 
 this book is both better and wiser. And so in placing your name on 
 this page I pay a debt and claim a distinguished friendship. 
 
 Vance Thompson. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Upon no subject — neither upon love nor 
 upon war — have there been so many books 
 written as upon drink. Indeed one may say 
 there is no significant writer, from the historian 
 Herodotus to the wanton poet Verlaine, who 
 has not touched upon this dark problem. 
 
 And the reason is plain: it lies at the root of 
 success in life, even as it lies at the root of hap- 
 piness in love; it colors all literature because 
 its stain is upon every phase of life. The 
 philosopher has seen in it the higher problem 
 of man's free will. Is Stoic self-control to be 
 enforced by law? And if man is to be ironed 
 and bar-locked into a sober way of life, what 
 of that imperial will of his? He is of slight 
 value as a citizen and as a national unit (the 
 philosopher declares) who has not will-power 
 enough to keep out of the gutter. 
 
 The political economists have written thou- 
 sands of books — which you will never read — 
 on the drink question. Not even the doctors 
 
 vii 
 
vlii PREFACE 
 
 have differed so widely as they differ. They 
 are uncommonly fond of statistics ; and on both 
 sides of the question they have attained a de- 
 moniac inaccuracy in the statement of facts. 
 Temperance orators of the political sort have 
 made it an issue. And the battle is ceaselessly 
 waged in literature. Popular novelists write 
 their confessions; they tell you how they have 
 solved (victoriously) the problem of drink. 
 These are brave, personal books. I commend 
 them. I praise the writers. But over against 
 Jack London you find no less a man than Gil- 
 bert K. Chesterton, battling, in the name of 
 liberty, for the wild delights and festivals of 
 drink — voluptas, gaudia. (His is the old Eng- 
 lish tradition — the tradition of Smollett and 
 Dickens, which in its time was generous and 
 gay; in their ample pages drink and love and 
 laughter were triune; not even Mr. Chesterton 
 can hold them together in the haggard Bohe- 
 mia of modern fiction.) 
 
 You cannot, I say, get away from the drink 
 problem. It meets you at every turn. It goes 
 abroad at night with the criminal. It is in 
 the madhouse and the jail. There is hardly 
 a home in the broad land into which it has 
 
PREFACE IX 
 
 not made its way. In some shape or other this 
 monstrous problem confronts you at every 
 crossroads of life. 
 
 When war broke over the world statesmen 
 and leaders grappled with it, as though it were 
 the one immediate evil. And it was the imme- 
 diate evil. Until drink was chained and 
 locked away men could not even kill each 
 other decently and with efficient certainty. 
 
 (While the young and fiery patriot bran- 
 dished his sword and shouted: "Let me lead 
 Britons! " the old, old general, out of a serious 
 wisdom, said: "When the canteen is fifty 
 leagues in our rear, yes!" 
 
 And he had his way.) 
 
 If the game of death can be played only 
 in terms of sobriety it is not unthinkable that 
 the game of life can best be won in the same 
 way. 
 
 But how are you going to establish the laws 
 of the game? How are you going to do it in 
 a civil world unruled by the abrupt tyranny 
 of military law? How are you going to do 
 it in a way that shall preserve the highest 
 reverence for the dignity of social life and for 
 human liberty? 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 It is to answer these questions that I have 
 written this little book. 
 
 I think there is one thing the state can do — 
 and it is not a vision or a phantasy; it is a 
 proved achievement — which will solve the 
 drink problem. Not little by little, with 
 shifts and compromises; but bluntly, com- 
 pellingly and completely as Great Britain 
 solved within her borders the problem of 
 man's enslavement by man. 
 
 As you shall see. 
 
 But it is not for that impersonal thing, the 
 state, I have written this book. I have written it 
 for men and women. It is not the state, fed 
 fat on revenues, that suffers from drink. Why 
 should it be expected to act? It never has 
 acted on its own volition. It has to be forced 
 and bullied into the way of right-doing, 
 for it is always (even in a democracy) far 
 behind the public intelligence and the pub- 
 lic will. That is why the drink problem is 
 a personal problem — for the man and the 
 woman. 
 
 Everyone must face it. I know quite well 
 you are not a drunkard. You are not a dipso- 
 maniac; your brain is not swept with drink- 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 storms. Your brother is not drinking with 
 Pan. Your daughter is not laughing with the 
 alcoholic girls at the country club. And yet 
 the problem is none the less a personal one — 
 if for no other reason than that it is a problem 
 of state economy and the state is just what you 
 make it. It is organized in precisely the way 
 you want it organized — you and the others 
 who vote. 
 
 And so it is your problem. 
 
 In New York City there is a melancholy 
 cohort that spends one million dollars a day 
 for drink. I admit that you are not of them — 
 but that army of slackers, wasters and crim- 
 inals exists and continues to exist by your 
 sovereign permission. I have no desire to 
 come at you with a sentimental appeal. This 
 is not a matter of sentiment. There is no use 
 in changing a man's feelings (you will admit) 
 if he goes on being wrong-headed. I have 
 tried to put the case in a plain way — without 
 exaggeration, without rhetoric, with sympa- 
 thetic understanding of the drinker and even 
 the purveyor of drink. You are a man of the 
 world, I take it, and you want to see the thing 
 broadly. You are keenly aware of the two 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 sides of the question; you know there must 
 be a choice — and all choice implies loss. 
 Exactly what that loss is you have a right to 
 know. I think in the end you will agree with 
 me that a remedy is needed — and must be 
 applied by the state; but you have a right to 
 know the facts and all the facts. You will 
 find them, I think, honestly stated in this book. 
 All of them — what alcohol is, why men drink 
 it, why some drinkers are drunkards, what pre- 
 disposition of mind or body encourages them, 
 the pathology of vice and the psychology of 
 the drunkard — strange and interesting things 
 are these. You shall have to go with me into 
 scenes of darkness and violence; you shall look 
 in the face of crime — and hear mad voices 
 shouting; always is it that you may know what 
 thing it is — the Drink. Hear, too, what the 
 scientist has to say, the physician, the economist 
 and the student (less one-sided) of life; but, 
 above all, see for yourself just what this con- 
 fused problem is. For, I think, that when you 
 see it — you, the men and women who direct 
 the intelligence of the state and shape its will 
 — then only it will be solved. 
 You are not convinced? 
 
PREFACE xiil 
 
 Before you pronounce judgment I trust you 
 will read this brief in the case. 
 
 And then — what is of more importance — is 
 the immutable fact that always, in the end, a 
 moral crusade wins. And this is a moral 
 crusade. 
 
 
/ 
 
 / 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE ., i 
 
 I think it should be made clear in the begin- 
 ning that there is only one " drink-problem " 
 — that of drinking alcohol. The drink habit 
 varies with different grades of society; it 
 changes with climate; but the drink-problem 
 neither varies nor changes. Just as the beer- 
 drinker takes his beer for the sake of the al- 
 cohol in it, so the wine-drinker takes his wine, 
 the brandy-drinker his brandy. He who drinks 
 alcoholic beverages drinks for the sake of the 
 alcohol — no matter what excuse he offers. So 
 the first question is: What is alcohol? 
 
 II. WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE 
 
 MAN i6 
 
 It is in the brain that alcohol produces Its 
 first effects. So my interest (and yours, I 
 trust) is in what alcohol does to this essential 
 
 part of man. Alcohol is intoxicating; that 
 
 is why men drink it — and for no other reason; 
 and he who would get at the root of intoxica- 
 tion — its pleasure and pain, its peril and pen- 
 alty — must study the physiological effects of 
 alcohol on the brain. There he may read its 
 story and its mystery. 
 
 III. THE MODERATE DRINKER r. 41 
 
 You have met this important person. In the 
 discussion of the good and ill of alcohol no one 
 is more conspicuous. A library of books has 
 been written about him. He is the whetstone 
 of every argument. Sometimes he is old; usu- 
 ally he is young; but there is one extraordinary 
 thing about him — always he is going down- 
 Stairs. Always he is getting away from that 
 
xvl CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAOB 
 
 ideal state of his; and if you meet him to- 
 morrow or the next month or the next year, 
 he will have ceased to be, in some appreci- 
 able degree, as moderate a drinker. For mod- 
 erate drinking is a stage; it is not a fixed point. 
 It is, as the French soldier says, an etape. 
 There is no moderate drinker who is "not 
 going to the next stage of his journey, or who 
 is not turning back. 
 
 IV. WINE AND BEER AND THEIR 
 
 LITTLE RURAL BROTHER ., 6$ 
 
 It is a maxim, melancholy in its veracity, 
 that the road to drunkenness is paved with 
 mild stimulants. Unless he is a lunatic, no 
 one begins by drinking spirits. Against such 
 an indignity the mere physical conscience re- 
 volts — the stomachic conscience turns over in 
 disgust. It is only when alcohol is forced in 
 upon it in pleasanter wine-y ways — in suave 
 disguises of malt — that nature compromises, 
 
 saying: " O, well, if you insist!" Nature 
 
 is always amenable to compromise; it is her 
 supreme law to preserve existence at any cost; 
 and she prolongs the poisoned life by adapt- 
 ing the organism to the exigencies of the 
 abnormal habit. Gradually she learns to 
 accept the alcoholic doses in the wine or beer; 
 and slowly she hardens the physical conscience 
 until it accepts its brandy neat. 
 
 V. ADULTERATION AND FALSIFL 
 
 CATION ..... 95 
 
 We have been told often enough by the wine- 
 makers that they are moved by the most phil- 
 anthropic motives; it is to save the race from 
 drunkenness that they want permission to dose 
 the young generation with " wine and water." 
 And the advertisements of the beer-brewers 
 will tell you what rare philanthropists they 
 are — providing beer as a " food " for the poor 
 man who has no mutton. Then if wine be 
 so good a thing — if pure beer be so valuable a 
 food — why do they not sell a pure wine and 
 a pure beer? 
 
CONTENTS xvii 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 VI. WHY SOME DRINKERS ARE 
 
 DRUNKARDS . . . . 107 
 
 There are two kinds of drunkards. One is 
 morally defective from the start — a sort of 
 moral imbecile; that was the cause of his tak- 
 ing to drink. The other drunkard has had to 
 set up a pathological process which would 
 bring him to the same state of moral imbecil- 
 ity. The one was born to his drunken inherit- 
 ance; the other prepared himself for it. The 
 one was diseased at the start. The other took 
 his self-appointed way, through vice, to the 
 identical degenerative condition of disease. 
 Both victims of alcohol are going the same 
 
 road of moral insanity and mental death. 
 
 Why, then, are some drinkers drunkards? 
 
 Why not all? It is the physiologist who 
 
 answers these questions. 
 
 VII. THERAPEUTICS . . .133 
 
 There is no disagreement as to the symptoms 
 of the disease; there is slight diversity as 
 to the treatment. Your inebriate, swept by 
 periodic drink-storms, is ill; your moderate 
 drinker, tippling diurnally, is ill; now the kind 
 of treatment demanded by his alcoholic state 
 depends upon his general health — a matter for 
 the qualified medical man. Of equal impor- 
 tance is the moral side of the treatment. 
 Drunkard, or light-tippling man, he can be 
 brought back to the sober way of life, if there 
 can be wakened in him the Will-to-be-Sober. 
 And then a new interest, driving out the old, 
 will serve to hold him to his purpose. Only by 
 new activities can you transform his desires. 
 
 VIII. CRIME, DRINK-STORMS AND 
 
 DEGENERATION . . .152 
 
 When a Lord Chief Justice of England said: 
 " If sifted, nine-tenths of the crime of England 
 and Wales could be traced to drink," the 
 statement had a repellent air — as though it 
 were born of uncritical fervor; but in this 
 
xviii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 country the facts, carefully collated, come 
 within measurable distance of his statement. 
 An illustration: The famous investigation 
 made by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor 
 Statistics showed that eighty-four per cent, of 
 all the criminals under conviction in that state 
 were drink-made criminals. As you see, it is 
 almost nine-tenths. And again: The last 
 census of the United States shows that the 
 institutional cases of insanity are in almost 
 exact proportion to the amount of alcoholic 
 consumption. Insanity is the mad son of alco- 
 hol. Idiocy is its driveling daughter. Suicide 
 is its despairing child. 
 
 IX. DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 177 
 
 Ours is the drunkennest civilization the world 
 
 has ever known. For generations science, 
 
 religion, statesmanship had fought this evil 
 thing of drink; they had pelted the evil thing 
 with tracts and tied it up in red-tape; all to 
 no saving purpose. In a world at war, when 
 the need of sobriety was imperative, the nations 
 found a way of scotching the evil thing. It 
 was simple and practical as shutting off an 
 electric current. It prohibited the manufacture 
 and sale of the fiercer kinds of alcoholic drink. 
 France was first in this, as she is always first 
 in the noblest missions of humanity. A half- 
 measure to be sure, but a measure of immense 
 significance by reason of the principle it lays 
 down. There is here more than the suggestion 
 of a remedy. 
 
 X, ETHICS AND ECONOMICS . 198 
 
 There is no contradiction between ethics and 
 economics. Not the wealth of a nation but the 
 highest welfare of the citizens is the thing to 
 be promoted. When there is such an opposition 
 it is the economical factor — not the ethical — 
 that must go to the wall. The chief argument 
 of the liquor forces is a threat of financial 
 panic, and, since " a million toilers will lose 
 their jobs," a threat of labor panic. The 
 whine of the " vested interests " is more diffi- 
 cult to meet; but a threat is the sort of thing 
 
CHAPTER 
 
 CONTENTS xix 
 
 one can answer more effectively. And the 
 
 answer is here. 
 
 XL MEASURES REMEDIAL . .. 218 
 
 The danger of studying a question so vital — 
 a subject with such a swing and urge of emo- 
 tion in it — is the tendency to become enthusi- 
 astic and slop about. The emotional way of 
 fighting drink is obsolete. The reason is that 
 the hour of controversial issues is past. There 
 is no longer any dispute as to the main and 
 primary facts in the case against alcohol. 
 With a thoroughness of intellectual treatment 
 none can gainsay our masters in physiology, 
 sociology and economics have pronounced 
 judgment. And the nation is awake to the 
 
 truth. And now comes the question? 
 
 What can the state do to alcohol ? 
 
DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE 
 
 No one has any business to go wrong; al- 
 ways his intelligence should be in advance of 
 his act. 
 
 And the one man in whom ignorance is 
 inexcusable is he who plays with the wild and 
 shifty forces of alcoholic drink. That man 
 should be wise above others; his intelligence 
 should be ever on outpost duty; and his first 
 business is to know what alcohol is. For 
 one thing is certain: when men drink — whether 
 they drink beer or wine or brandy — they drink 
 alcohol. The sole reason for the existence of 
 these beverages is that they provide him who 
 drinks them with a greater or less quantity 
 of alcohol. They may be disguised with fan- 
 ciful perfumes and flavors, hidden in a harle- 
 quinade of colors, but the reason for their ex- 
 istence is always the same — it is alcohol. 
 
2 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 An immense amount of hypocrisy has grown 
 up about the custom and habit of drinking 
 alcoholic beverages. It has been given a free 
 and lordly air, as though there were some- 
 thing exceptionally big-hearted and unselfish 
 about it. This lie has come, roaring arro- 
 gantly, down through the ages. It has got 
 itself told in prose and verse; in fact, it reels 
 through most of the second-rate literature of 
 every country. 
 
 That is bad enough; indeed, it is responsi- 
 ble for more than its fair share of the evils 
 that come (unquestionably) from the abuse 
 of alcohol — and I shall have a word to say, in 
 due time and place, of the physiological basis 
 of this false emotionalism and fugitive altru- 
 ism; but there is a subtler hypocrisy which 
 makes its appeal to man's vanity. 
 
 '' It's a rare good vintage," says the wine- 
 drinker, holding up his glass. 
 
 I have heard the phrase hundreds of times — 
 parroted in Parisian cafes, stated with a pomp- 
 ous air of discrimination at ornate dinner- 
 tables, muttered by wine-drunkards in the cur- 
 tained darkness of Italian wine-shops. Now 
 two things are to be said: the first is that a 
 
THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE 3 
 
 discriminating wine-palate is as rare as white 
 peacocks are in Arizona; and the second is 
 that such a man — a connoisseur in vintages — 
 has gained his knowledge by wide drinking. 
 It, no more than a knowledge of trigonometry, 
 comes by nature. And when he tells you he 
 drinks his wine because it comes from Capri — 
 and quotes his Horace; or when he prates 
 of the sunny hills of Burgundy or the white 
 slopes of Provence, he is honest neither with 
 himself nor with you. He may indeed like this 
 flavor or that bouquet, but he drinks his Bur- 
 gundy — not because its bouquet calls to him, 
 but because there is fifteen per cent, of alcohol 
 in the wine. He drinks for the sake of the 
 alcohol, though it may be quite true that the 
 flavor — the haunting immaterial poetry of the 
 wine — makes him prefer that pleasant way of 
 getting the alcohol into him. Why not? In 
 other respects, too, he is a nice-mannered 
 man. He had rather dine delicately at a 
 well-appointed table than gorge on boiled food 
 in a cellar. He has only disesteem for the 
 coarse man who gulps down fiery rum. But 
 he — just as the coarse fellow drinks the rum — 
 drinks his Burgundy for the alcohol that is 
 
4 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 in it. That is the plain truth; the rest is 
 mere hypocrisy — often unconscious hypocrisy, 
 for the lie is so ancient that men inherit it, 
 like the gout. Of course, the well-bred man 
 prefers a radiant and delicate claret — a petu- 
 lant wine of Champagne — to the dreary, sod- 
 dening gin the ^^ navvy " swills; but his object 
 is the same — to get the alcohol into his sys- 
 tem. (If you were a kissing man you had 
 rather kiss a pretty, perfumed lady in silks 
 and laces, than the plowman's blowsy girl; but 
 it would be kissing all the same.) 
 
 Thus, I think, it should be made clear in 
 the beginning that there is only one '' drink 
 problem " — that of drinking alcohol. It varies 
 with different grades of society; it changes with 
 climate; but the problem neither varies nor 
 changes. The dreary '^ cider boy " of the Con- 
 necticut hills is brother to the flushed girl — 
 in silk stockings — shouting for " high-balls " 
 on the porch of the country club; and the Bur- 
 gundy man is sib to the man of " mixed ale "; 
 one and all are drinkers of alcohol. 
 
 And what is alcohol? 
 
THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE 5 
 
 II 
 
 It is a simple thing, alcohol. 
 
 The chemist will describe it for you in a 
 pretty arrangement of letters and arabic fig- 
 ures, from which you will learn that it is 
 composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. 
 The kind you drink — or do not drink — is 
 ethylic alcohol; and the chemist will tell you 
 it is produced by the fermentation of aqueous 
 sugar-solutions and subsequent distillations. 
 
 All of which is important but uninteresting. 
 
 It is only when the chemist tells you what 
 causes the fermentation that you listen to him 
 willingly. Then you meet — with profound 
 amazement — the mycoderma cerevisice. 
 
 You may think of it, not as something fear- 
 some, but as a species of fungus, made up of 
 minute organisms, living much as you and I 
 do in the ordinary way of life — taking nourish- 
 ment, absorbing oxygen and giving off Car- 
 bon, reproducing their kind and, in due season, 
 dying; their biography at first glance would 
 seem to be that of ordinary men. And yet 
 you shall see that their strange little lives have 
 all the inevitable horror of Greek tragedy. 
 
6 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 They are found, these mycodermata, in great 
 quantities — a veritable dust of microscopic life 
 — on the skins of ripe grapes. They are mys- 
 terious dwellers in the bloom of the grape 
 (whereof poets have sung) and they are the 
 mysterious soul of wine. They are the obscure 
 alcoholic gods. 
 
 Have you seen the brown Italian girls — 
 or the great-limbed women of Switzerland — 
 tread the grapes? At all events you have seen 
 a wine-press. Then you understand how the 
 resolute little mycodermata get into the juice 
 of the grape. What they do there is the be- 
 ginning — the first act — in the great human 
 tragedy of drink. 
 
 The chemist (of whom you have heard) says 
 they take from the grape-sugar a certain part 
 of its oxygen. This changes the chemical rela- 
 tions of the carbon, oxygen and hydrogen of 
 which the sugar is composed, and, by a rear- 
 rangement of the elements, alcohol is formed. 
 You can watch the process; it is gradual. Lit- 
 tle by little the oxygen is consumed, until the 
 entire quantity of sugar disappears; what is 
 left is alcohol. With the alcohol you find 
 water, coloring matter, flavoring substances and 
 
THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE 7 
 
 (tragically) the corpses of the little myco- 
 dermata, who, having devoured all the sugar, 
 die of starvation and sink into alcoholic graves. 
 (It is a melancholy destiny, but not without par- 
 allel: In Persepolis they worshiped fire and 
 fire destroyed the city.) 
 
 These little inhabitants of the bloom of the 
 grape are their own victims. They are the 
 makers of that mysterious and perplexing poi- 
 son — alcohol — and they are its first martyrs. 
 In their obscure and tragic lives you may see, 
 if you will, a symbol; for it is as if, in invent- 
 ing alcohol, they had invented suicide. 
 
 They build a house, but the house they 
 build is death, and it falls and buries them 
 in its ruins. 
 
 This, then, is alcohol, the chemist avers; and 
 out of the fermented mass (wherein the sui- 
 cidal mycodermata found drunken graves) the 
 pure alcohol is distilled. 
 
 For the Scot who gets his alcohol from 
 barley, the American who gets his from 
 maize or the German who takes his from a 
 potato, the process is the same; each depends 
 upon the collaboration of these indefatigable 
 little organisms. When the grain is malted and 
 
8 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 made ready for fermentation most of the starch 
 is turned into grape-sugar — making thus a 
 saccharine solution akin to grape-juice — which 
 serves as food for the mycodermata. (They are 
 usually introduced in yeast ferments.) 
 
 Alcohol is a liquid, ethyl hydrate — C2H5OH, 
 says the chemist; in its pure state it is limpid, 
 colorless and the odor is suave. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There are two things I wish to make per- 
 fectly clear: what man does to alcohol, and 
 what alcohol does to man. They are epic 
 things. Pure alcohol is, as I have said, limpid, 
 colorless and suave of odor. When man has 
 had his way with it, its limpidity is trou- 
 bled, and its colors and odors are those of a 
 girl of the night. I am not referring here to 
 the base falsifications and adulterations of mod- 
 ern spirits, wines and beers; there is a chap- 
 ter for that in this book. What I would note 
 here — for convenient reference — is the form in 
 which alcohol is offered and the amount of 
 alcohol the common beverages contain. They 
 vary greatly, of course. 
 
THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE 9 
 
 Brandy, which Dr. Johnson called a drink 
 for strong men — and he was the son of a 
 drunken generation — is produced by distilling 
 wine and contains (when first made) about 
 fifty per cent, of alcohol. It is your real 'alf 
 an' 'alf. In its first stage it is a colorless 
 liquid. It is only when it is put up in casks that 
 it steals an amber hue from the wood. Gradu- 
 ally its alcoholic strength diminishes — a fair 
 French brandy contains about forty per cent, 
 of alcohol when it comes to market. The 
 alcoholic strength of whisky, whether distilled 
 from barley, maize, rye or other grains, is a 
 trifle less; rum, a product of distilled molasses 
 and the refuse of the cane-sugar factories, is 
 not quite so strong as whisky; and gin, which 
 is a distillation of unmalted grain, rectified and 
 flavored with juniper berries, contains about 
 thirty per cent, of alcohol. These are the 
 commoner spirits — at least, in the white man's 
 world. 
 
 In natural wines, derived from the fer- 
 mented juice of the grape, the quantity of 
 alcohol varies from eight to twenty-five per 
 cent. Beer is a beverage made (theoretically)' 
 from the fermented infusions of malt, flavored 
 
10 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 with hops. The ales and beers of commerce 
 vary greatly in strength; in general, they may 
 be said to contain from three to nine per cent, 
 of alcohol. 
 
 These familiar facts had to get themselves 
 told; one cannot discuss a thing without first 
 defining it — that were to tug at a rope of 
 sand. And the various forms of alcoholic 
 drink — each having its own pleasure and pain 
 and its own peculiar drunkenness — are quite 
 as important as the mysterious poison they 
 have in common; and each will demand sepa- 
 rate consideration. But for the moment — 
 at this point — my purpose is broader. I want 
 to show what alcohol does to man; what it 
 does to any man and every man, to you as 
 to another. After all, the subject is im- 
 portant only because it is personal — because 
 the problem of drink can be stated in terms of 
 your personal relation to it. 
 
 IV 
 
 You have asked yourself — if not you are ask- 
 ing yourself now: ^' Is alcohol a good thing for 
 me?" 
 
THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE ii 
 
 Possibly you have made many experiments — 
 or one or two. Then you have found — what 
 every man from the honest scientist to the 
 thoughtful barman finds — that alcohol is not 
 a good thing for you; in certain ascertained 
 quantities being, in fact, a bad thing. 
 
 So the problem comes to this: ''How much 
 can I take without undue harm?" 
 
 The question cannot be put in a fairer way 
 — in a way more scientific and less emotional. 
 It shows that you have a practical mind. You 
 open, as it were, a profit and loss account with 
 alcohol. You do not call it — as I have heard 
 it called — a pandemic plague. You do not 
 lie awake nights cursing the mycoderma. You 
 go about it in a practical way. On one side 
 of the account you set down what you lose 
 in moral, mental and physical ways; on the 
 other side — with scrupulous fairness — the 
 gains. 
 
 For there are gains. 
 
 Let us get that matter clear once for all. 
 
 There are gains, or humanity had not for 
 so many ages drunk deep — you had not been 
 able tojpok back to the twilight of history 
 ^nS'^een (everywhere) mankind at its cups. 
 
12 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 Something, you know, these wine-stained gen- 
 erations gained, or they had never paid the 
 bitter price. 
 
 What are the most apparent gains? 
 
 You set them down as social cheer, as the 
 exhilaration that lifts dull mortality to a flash- 
 ing level, as forgetfulness — that drowsy forget- 
 fulness of the actualities of life, which is per- 
 haps the rarest thing a man can purchase. You 
 set them all down; for you know that not 
 every drinker seeks only physical and mate- 
 rial drunkenness. No; across a world of piti- 
 ful attempts at wine-born merriment, you see 
 the poet seeking the blue flower of the au-dela, 
 the dreamer hunting his dream. (I am not 
 embellishing with rhetoric the drunkard's vice 
 or taking away its ethical significance; for it 
 is a sad and certain fact that those who sought 
 the dream in wine found the nightmare — as 
 James Thomson found it in the '' City of 
 Dreadful Night," and Poe in the '' Valley of 
 Many-colored Grass"; but to minds of this 
 order even the visionary chase seems to be a 
 gain.) 
 
 Set it all down in the account. What men 
 like best about drinking in company, which is 
 
THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE 13 
 
 the admired way to drink (^Svho drinks Hol- 
 lands alone and in a churchyard") is unques- 
 tionably the social freedom — the letting down 
 of bars. I do not deny this gain. Why should 
 I? The bashful man, exhilarated by alcohol, 
 loses his nervousness, the reticent man grows 
 frank and confidential — it is only at such a mo- 
 ment you learn his grandfather was hanged; 
 in fact, in such company life becomes free and 
 unbuttoned. The historic example is that of 
 Theodore Hook. When he went sober into 
 society he sat silent, shamefaced and glum. 
 His second bottle set him singing, rhyming, 
 playing the mimic — an admirable wit. Dis- 
 tinctly there was a social gain there, for it 
 made a droll, public entertainer out of a bash- 
 ful unsocial man. Here the gain, as you ob- 
 serve, is not so much to the man who does the 
 drinking as it is to his companions, who have 
 the opportunity of seeing him flash and caper 
 and throw ofif his buttoned-up reserve of man- 
 ner. Of course, a question still to be consid- 
 ered is the price the drinker pays for it. For 
 the time being set it down: the drinking man 
 gains a certain social cheer — lawless in a way, 
 but indubitably fascinating to the kind of man 
 
14 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 who cannot " let himself go " when he is 
 sober. In a deeper " mist of intoxication/' 
 to use Thoreau's phrase, that man " forgets his 
 troubles " — not a negligible advantage. 
 
 In what you have set down you have summed 
 up the chief gains to be got by drinking alco- 
 hol, in this coaxing form or that. 
 
 It makes a man bolder than he is by nature. 
 I have always loved that story of the mouse 
 who came upon a little pool of whisky spilled 
 upon the floor; he drank, and once again; then 
 he cocked up his head and said: ^'Where's 
 that cat that was chasing me yesterday? " 
 
 I accept this quality of boldness to be got 
 from drink, but I would reluctantly admit it 
 as a social gain. Burke, the criminal, who 
 gave his name to a peculiarly atrocious kind 
 of crime, said he got his " courage " from 
 drink; indeed, he had to have a dram of brandy 
 before murdering a child. It is an unde- 
 sirable kind of courage. — 
 
 (I know whereof I speak. I never followed 
 Burke's way of life, but once upon a time in 
 my green youth I was a reporter on a New 
 York newspaper. One day I was told to inter- 
 view . He was never a pleas- 
 
THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE 15 
 
 ant, forthcoming, courteous man to the inter- 
 viewer, and this day he was singularly sore- 
 headed and gruff, owing to a smashing political 
 defeat. 
 
 " Go ask him," said my editor, ^' what he 
 
 thinks of Senator ," — it being the 
 
 hand of Senator that had knifed him; and 
 
 my editor — who was Mr. Foster Coates — added 
 thoughtfully: ''You had best put a pint of 
 champagne in you first." I was innocent and 
 I took his advice; also the pint. Unfortu- 
 nately the plan didn't work. When I came 
 
 face to face with Mr. I discovered 
 
 — to my dismay — that he had taken two pints!) 
 
 Gayety and social freedom and cheer, per- 
 haps forgetfulness of unpleasant things, and 
 courage of a sort — these, I think, are the best 
 alcohol has to offer. They are all tolerably 
 agreeable results. That is why you have set 
 them down in your list of alcoholic gains. 
 And now the question is: How does alcohol 
 do these things to a man? Whence come the 
 glow of good feeling, the companionable frank- 
 ness, the unbuttoned freedom of mood? 
 
 First of all— 
 
CHAPTER II 
 WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 
 
 And first of all I am not writing of the 
 drunkard. 
 
 I have in mind the practical man you were 
 when you drew up a profit and loss account 
 with alcohol; the kind of man who says: "I 
 can take an ounce of alcohol a day — in so 
 many glasses of beer or brandies-and-soda," 
 or, being a big, stark, healthy man, ^' my two 
 ounces a day"; in other words, the man out of 
 whose mouth comes the familiar quotation: 
 ^' Thank Heaven, I can drink and be sober! " 
 
 I am interested in that man. 
 
 The teetotal scientists, I know, draw horrid 
 pictures of his stomach and his hobnailed 
 liver. I refuse to get excited over his stomach 
 and his liver. What interests me is his brain, 
 for the brain — as near as we can come to it — 
 is the man. It is the organ (and the only one) 
 
 I6 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 17 
 
 through which I can get in touch with that 
 strange thing, your Ego — or you with mine. 
 There it is I get vaguely at the thing that 
 makes you Ethelhert de Courcy (if you are 
 Ethelbert de Courcy) and not Vance Thomp- 
 son. It is in the brain that alcohol produces 
 the effects whereof there has been something 
 written — the social gayety and freedom, the 
 memory blinded to the unpleasant facts of life, 
 the courage and all the rest of it. So my inter- 
 est (and yours, I trust) is in what alcohol does 
 to this essential part of man. 
 
 Alcohol is intoxicating; that is why men 
 drink it — and for no other reason; and he who 
 would get at the root of intoxication — its pleas- 
 ure and pain, its peril and penalty — must study 
 the physiological effects of alcohol on the 
 brain. There he may read its story and its 
 mystery. It is the beginning of the entire 
 problem and — no matter how far afield one 
 fares into matters civic and economic — its end. 
 
 Science, not yet omniscient, is content to 
 look upon the brain as being made up of mil- 
 lions of cells, each cell having two nerve-fibers 
 — one bringing to it nerve motion and the other 
 conducting energy from it. Certain of the^e 
 
1 8 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 cells, having found they had similar work to 
 do, have formed a kind of communistic so- 
 ciety. They group themselves and work to- 
 gether. Endlessly doing the same thing, they 
 become identified with one kind of work. So 
 you have the speech-group, for instance, which 
 attends to the mechanism of talking. These 
 groups are not all of the same age. They were 
 developed little by little as the varying needs 
 arose. The modern physiologist thinks of them 
 as layer upon layer; this is the theory of Func- 
 tional Levels. They have been divided into 
 three great levels or planes. 
 
 It is easy to understand if you bear in mind 
 that the oldest bodily habits — which have now 
 become automatic — belong to the lower plane. 
 Digestion, growth, breathing, blood-circulation 
 and the like are old established functions. The 
 nerve-groups that control them are buried deep 
 in the nervous system — so deep the will cannot 
 reach them. There, too, lie the groups that 
 feed the muscles. For example: — 
 
 I dip my pen in the ink. The muscles, as 
 I have said, and their nutrition, have their 
 nerve-groups on the lowest plane. The move- 
 ment — the nicely adjusted muscular action with 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 19 
 
 which I dip the pen — has its groups on the 
 middle plane. But the conception of the move- 
 ment, the idea of pen and ink and the written 
 page before me, have their home on the high- 
 est level. 
 
 It is clear, is it not? 
 
 The higher functions are on the higher level, 
 the highest on the highest. This upper plane 
 was the most recently acquired in evolution. 
 Therefore, it is the least stable. It is still 
 within the sphere of the will. You may think 
 of it, if you please, as the physical basis of 
 character; and it is not difficult to see how 
 delicately complex — how easily thrown out of 
 order — are these nervous processes which are 
 concerned in right conduct. The older groups 
 of nerve-cells which attend to ^' the automatic 
 mechanism of the vital functions " are buried 
 deep in the lower level and are not easily per- 
 turbed. Those on the highest plane, more re- 
 cently acquired, still swayed by the will, deli- 
 cate and complex, are always in peril. 
 
 And they are not isolated. Peril comes to them 
 from every side; for they are linked by nerve- 
 fibers to every other group of cells on all the 
 planes. In the exact words of the physiologist. 
 
20 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 every organ (and every function of the body) 
 is triply represented in the nervous system — it 
 is represented on each of the three planes. It 
 is not difficult to imagine how extremely deli- 
 cate must be the mechanism which co-ordinates 
 them. A fragile machine — triply delicate. 
 
 Now what I would get at is the exact effect 
 alcohol has upon it. 
 
 The man takes a drink. He takes his bot- 
 tle of wine, or his glass or two or three of 
 whisky. A certain part of the alcohol passes 
 unchanged through the bodily system — and is, 
 from the drinker's viewpoint, economically 
 wasted. The rest mingles with the blood and 
 is carried through the body. If you vivisect 
 the man who has taken the drink, you will find 
 alcohol in all the large organs; but chiefly you 
 will find it in the nervous system. 
 
 This is a fierce, deep and tragic fact. 
 
 There is a sort of dark " affinity " between 
 alcohol and the brain-tissue. They come to- 
 gether like cats in the night. You will see in 
 a moment the significance of this fact. 
 
 The first effect of alcohol is on the nerve- 
 centers, or groups, which control and regu- 
 late the blood supply. That is where the 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 21 
 
 ^' stimulation " comes in. The heart feels it; its 
 action is hurried. The blood-vessels in the 
 stomach dilate and glow pleasantly — whereby 
 the man fancifully thinks a drink has warmed 
 him up. Then the brain gets the ^' stimula- 
 tion." The nervous processes are quickened. 
 It seems easier to think. There is a sense of 
 bodily well-being, for " organic congratula- 
 tions " are pouring in from the glowing blood- 
 vessels. This is the physical effect — the first 
 one — that makes men love their wine. 
 
 And now the alcohol, coursing through the 
 system, with the blood-elements, has reached 
 the brain; what does it do? 
 
 II 
 
 *' The action induced in the brain is of the 
 nature of a progressive paralysis, beginning 
 with the highest level, and its most delicate 
 functions, and spreading gradually down 
 through the lower. Moral qualities and the 
 higher processes of intelligence are, therefore, 
 first invaded/' 
 
 And here I have got to the point I wanted 
 to make in this chapter: 
 
22 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 Alcohol first attacks — first, mark you, and 
 not last — the highest part of man, his moral 
 nature. (That is why Burke drank brandy 
 when he would murder a child; it was not, as 
 he thought, to give himself '' courage" — it 
 was to silence the protest of whatever poor 
 remnant of moral nature was in him.) 
 ^From the top down — that is the way alcohol 
 works on a man; it destroys first what is high- 
 est in him — the moral qualities so painfully 
 acquired in the long years of evolution. It is 
 the most delicate part of the mental machinery 
 that is first impaired — that which has been 
 most recently and most fragilely built up in 
 the evolution of character: the moral part. 
 
 Alcohol, even in minute quantities, is intoxi- 
 cating — that is, it is toxic — and exactly in pro- 
 portion to the quantity taken is the impairment 
 of the moral nature. Do not imagine that 
 this pleasurable bodily glow and well-being of 
 distended blood-vessels, which make for a 
 fatuous kind of altruism, has anything to do 
 with character. By just so much character is 
 impaired. The moral standards sag and sway. 
 The drinking man, of whom I write, has let 
 down the bars. Morally he is a looser man. 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 23 
 
 The entire man on that upper plane is loos- 
 ened and unbraced. The higher processes of 
 the intelligence will go on with delicate preci- 
 sion after — and there, indeed, is the most mon- 
 strous peril — after the moral faculties are dis- 
 ordered and defective. If you have studied 
 the man who drinks; if you have studied the 
 girl — in silk stockings — on the porch of the 
 country club, you know this to be indubitably 
 true. Always the moral paralysis is the first 
 physiological effect of alcohol on the brain. 
 From the top downwards. 
 
 You will say it does not greatly matter so 
 long as the intellect stands, in fact, on guard; 
 but it is a physiological truth that the finer part 
 of man's mentality is the next victim — an almost 
 immediate victim — of the toxic paralysis. Sci- 
 entific investigators notice first the loss of self- 
 control. There are delicate psychometric in- 
 struments for measuring the loss. On the same 
 plane is the associated group — to use the tech- 
 nical jargon — of judgment cells. They are next 
 invaded. Now the man who gets drunk goes 
 rapidly through all the stages; the restrained 
 drinker, frugal, more than moderate, passes 
 them more slowly — taking, it may be, years; 
 
24 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 but always alcohol is doing the same thing to 
 his brain. 
 
 Theodore Hook, when he drank himself into 
 a state of talkative jollity, doubtless put him- 
 self in about this situation. The moral part of 
 him was in abeyance; his judgment was so de- 
 fective that he willingly made a zany of him- 
 self — with no thought of self-respect which 
 ordinarily kept him a quiet man; meanwhile 
 his imagination, still unaffected, was loose and 
 lively. The bridle was off it. It ran blithely 
 wild. In a little w^hile it, too, would run 
 down into cloudy confusion. What would be 
 still alive would be the emotional nature of 
 the man — quite uncontrolled now by the higher 
 mind. He would become affectionate and hug 
 his table companion; or bellicose and insult 
 him; or he would weep. It is the inevitable 
 succession of events. The emotions, unchecked 
 and unguided, go their own way. And (always 
 descending) the toxic paralysis touches the 
 springs of the will and it sleeps; until, in the 
 end, there is left only the animal man — a thing 
 in whom only the automatic functions of life 
 persist. 
 
 Thus, rapidly, I have sketched the physio- 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 25 
 
 logical effects of alcohol upon the three levels 
 of the brain. And you have observed that 
 the highest qualities are first impaired. The 
 same law holds good as you drop from plane 
 to plane, and through each plane. Thus the 
 speech-group functions on the middle level. 
 
 I remember once sitting with Alfred Henry 
 Lewis in a New York tavern, where we drank 
 water. He was curious in the study of hu- 
 manity and he had gathered round him, at 
 table, a company of gamblers, pugilists, crimi- 
 nals, politicians and bad husbands. I had 
 mentioned to him the theory (then new) that 
 drunkenness acts from above downwards, and, 
 as our company tippled away, we studied the 
 process on the speech-level. Almost all im- 
 proper men afifect a nice propriety of speech — 
 notably the New York type. At first the con- 
 versation was rather formal. Our guests were 
 respecting themselves. Little by little the 
 speech loosened; it lost exactitude. Words 
 were made to do double duty. Then the pro- 
 nunciation stumbled and fell apart. The 
 spoken words were deformed, slurred over, 
 maltreated. The next loss was in intonation — 
 as though the speaking voice were getting out 
 
26 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 of control. And at last the conversation be- 
 came purely automatic — a sort of emotional 
 repetition of stock phrases and slang locu- 
 tions, the mere parrot utterance of ready-made 
 word-combinations that required little more 
 than muscular effort. 
 
 Of course, the most serious stage is reached 
 when the co-ordination between the three planes 
 is broken, but that matter belongs to the 
 pathology of alcoholism. For the moment our 
 concern is with the brain of man and what 
 alcohol does to it. 
 
 It first destroys — or impairs — what is most 
 delicate, most complex and most important. 
 
 This is the significant fact you have to set 
 down against the gains to be got from alcohol. 
 It is understood you are not interested in the 
 man with the hobnailed liver and the sodden 
 drunkard who has got to the end of his career. 
 But take the ounce-or-two-a-day man. Take him 
 who can, thank Heaven! drink and be sober. 
 Sobriety is a broad word. It includes the 
 three planes. The body may be sober — that 
 is, normal enough; the emotional level, the 
 imagination, even the higher intelligence, may 
 be unaffected and unimpaired; but of no man, 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 27 
 
 in whose bodily system there is alcohol in 
 any degree, can it be said that his moral quali- 
 ties are normal. Good conduct, like every 
 other mental habit, must have an organic basis 
 — a mechanism of nerve-cells and fibers. This 
 mechanism, as you know, is recently acquired 
 in man and is still unstable and of extreme 
 fragility. The alcohol which leaves the rest 
 of the man '' sober," beats savagely upon this 
 fragile mechanism. Not perhaps, but cer- 
 tainly; not occasionally, but always. The first 
 impairment is moral; the first lapse is moral; 
 for every man who takes alcohol is drunk at 
 the top. 
 
 This degeneration may not immediately ex- 
 press itself in immoral action; but you have 
 only to wait. The moment the higher intel- 
 ligence is touched in its turn by the toxic 
 paralysis — when the judgment goes off guard, 
 and the emotions are uncontrolled — that man 
 will break the moral law. You can trust him 
 neither with a purse or a woman or an oath. 
 And if you are that man, you cannot trust 
 yourself. You are drunk at the top. And so 
 long as you drink you can not get morally 
 sober, no matter how well in hand you keep 
 
28 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 mind and body. For every successive dose of 
 alcohol goes there first. And every toxic repe- 
 tition increases the moral disaster. No matter 
 how sober he may be from that highest plane 
 downward, the man who drinks alcohol is 
 morally defective; he may keep within the 
 criminal law because his judgment tells him 
 to, or because his passions do not tempt him 
 out of it; but morally he is impotent — the 
 very organic basis of altruism and good moral 
 feeling in him is destroyed. It is dead of 
 alcoholic paralysis. 
 
 Set that down in your account of profit and 
 loss. 
 
 Do the gains seem especially attractive now 
 you know the physiological price — the mere 
 destruction of the nerve-elements — you are 
 called upon to pay? 
 
 Wine warms the cockles of the heart; it 
 clouds the brain with a pleasant mist wherein 
 disagreeable memories are obscured; it loosens 
 the reins of judgment and daring risks seem 
 paltry things — life seems a sporting venture; 
 but the first price to be paid is a moral one. 
 What alcohol does first to a man is to poison 
 his moral nature — to paralyze it, as the physi- 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 29 
 
 ologists say. He is a good fellow, a whimsical 
 and jolly companion, the man who can, thank 
 Heaven, drink and be sober. He is sober in 
 body and sober mentally. 
 
 It is only morally he is drunk. 
 
 That is the price he pays — stated with sci- 
 entific precision. This is not a new fact. Ob- 
 scurely the public mind has always recognized 
 it. Your banker may not have reasoned the 
 matter out; but he knows that the man who 
 drinks alcohol — even the ounce-a-day man — is 
 morally impaired and he does not set him 
 to guard the strong-box. Bar cases of moral 
 insanity (which are due to exactly the same 
 paralysis of the higher brain functions as that 
 caused by alcohol), it may be broadly said that 
 the crimes of the world are committed by those 
 who have deformed — by this toxic agent or 
 that one — the highest functional level. In 
 plain words: the criminal begins his bad busi- 
 ness by putting the moral man in him to sleep. 
 And nothing does that so subtly and insidi- 
 ously as alcohol. 
 
 It is one of the things alcohol does to a man. 
 
30 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 III 
 
 There are other drugs that do the same thing 
 alcohol does to a man. They put to sleep the 
 higher functions of the brain and break the 
 co-ordination of the three planes of the brain; 
 and, in addition, they do it more quickly than 
 alcohol does. The inventive chemists have per- 
 fected scores of these drugs, which act upon 
 the nervous system. The less harmful ones — 
 bromides, for instance — affect chiefly the mid- 
 dle plane, but certain fiercer poisons go 
 straight to the highest point in man. Alcohol 
 goes about its business slowly; it takes years, 
 it may be, to do what cocaine does in a flash — 
 but physiologically it is doing the same thing. 
 It is merely the rapidity of its action which 
 makes the '' snow-rider " take to cocaine in- 
 stead of to the leisurely stimulation of whisky. 
 He is riding to the same goal. His '^ heaven 
 dust " is quicker in its action on the brain — 
 more rapidly annihilates the moral impulse and 
 banishes self-control; that is all. 
 
 Only— 
 
 The drug-taker is usually a solitary. It is 
 not for companionship that the opium-smoker 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 3 1 
 
 goes to a den; indeed, in him the very sources 
 and springs of companionship are dead; even 
 sex has vanished. It is usually only in their 
 first, early acquaintance with the drug that 
 cocaine-users meet in common and sniff or 
 spray their nostrils with the '^ coke." Sooner 
 or later the " snow-rider " rides alone — his fan- 
 tastic ride to death. But the immensely im- 
 portant fact about alcohol is that it makes for 
 a kind of sociability. There is no blinking 
 this truth. It is not one of the mere hypocri- 
 sies of drink — like the wine-drinker's parade 
 of connoisseurship. It is a fact. 
 
 I have shown the physiological basis for the 
 glow and comfort that comes from alcohol — 
 a reflex effect from the excitation of the nerve- 
 endings in the mouth and stomach, which 
 makes for a sense of well-being. You may 
 safely say this lies at the basis of the drinker's 
 desire for companionship. He is momentarily 
 at peace. His physical body whispers con- 
 gratulations. Mentally, too, he is loosened up 
 and emotionally he is excited. He would fain 
 talk; and he looks about him for someone to 
 talk with. 
 
 And with whom? 
 
32 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 When you have answered this question you 
 will have got at the essence of alcoholic com- 
 panionship. 
 
 In an early stage of drinking — almost from 
 the beginning — a desire to talk is as auto- 
 matic and imperative as a natural vital func- 
 tion. Moreover, discrimination and judgment 
 being blurred, a man does not greatly care 
 whom he talks with. His speech-centers are 
 excited and they must function. He must talk, 
 even if he has to talk to his wife or to the 
 barmen. But wives and barmen are generally 
 sober folk and soon weary of him. So in- 
 evitably he goes to his kind. There you have 
 the reason why men drink in clubs and bar- 
 rooms and not (like Gabriel Grub) ^^ alone and 
 in a churchyard." 
 
 This habit of getting together to drink has 
 been decorated with an immense amount of 
 flummery. The basic physical need for ex- 
 pression — expansion — has been so tricked out 
 in social prettinesses that at first glance one 
 cannot recognize it. It is like the gypsy wench 
 Roderick Random dressed up in silks and took 
 into court circles. If an accurate physiological 
 analysis of just what alcohol is doing to a 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 33 
 
 merry group of ladies and gentlemen at a 
 supper-table were drawn up and printed on 
 the back of the wine-card, you would have a 
 clearer idea of what all the friendly chatter 
 of your guests really means. 
 
 And yet you can never get at the heart of 
 the drink problem until you have cleared 
 away the cant of social companionship. Dr. 
 Johnson, talking of " in vino Veritas," said he 
 would not foregather with the kind of man 
 who had to be got drunk in order that the 
 truth might be extracted from him. In much 
 the same way it may be said that the ideal 
 companion is not the man (or woman) whose 
 social charm depends upon a greater or less 
 degree of alcoholic paralysis. 
 
 Yet the charm is there. 
 
 It is perishable; it lasts but a little while; 
 but unquestionably it is there. I believe that 
 most men and boys take to drink for the sake 
 of it. None of them ever took a first drink 
 for the flavor or taste of it. (Even from new 
 wine a child will turn; for it is an old law of 
 nature that all hurtful things are repulsive.) 
 Boy or man, he took that first drink for social 
 reasons — and against the grain. He took it 
 
34 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 out of an imitative impulse to do as others 
 were doing, or a desire to get into the same 
 loose-buttoned state of light-boasting assertive- 
 ness and irresponsibility. He, too, wanted to 
 loosen up, get the higher man out of the way 
 and let the lower emotional man — with his 
 friendly caperings and tail-waggings — strut for 
 a while in the light. 
 
 Alcoholic companionship, like alcoholic 
 friendship, belongs to the lower level; at its 
 highest it does not get above the emotional 
 plane; at its commonest it is on the physical. 
 
 It is always selfish, because it is always 
 based on the desire a paraitre — to display one's 
 own engaging personality. And the social 
 charm (which clings, one must admit, to the 
 drinking habit) exists only for those who are 
 at precisely the same degree of alcoholic ex- 
 citement or paralysis. It is not only true 
 that the sober man — sober on the three planes 
 — gets no persistent enjoyment out of the com- 
 pany of those who are not as he is; it is also 
 true that the man who has had his three 
 ounces is out of harmony with a one-ounce 
 man. You get social accord only among those 
 who are approximately at pretty nearly the 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 35 
 
 same state of alcoholic poisoning. Therefore 
 it is that society has drawn hard and fast 
 rules round the drink habit. It is bad form — 
 it means ostracism — not to drink and be sober 
 in a certain grade of society. One must take 
 one's wine at table, or one's whisky-and-soda 
 in the billiard-room, or one's gin and water 
 before going to bed, in a moderate and deco- 
 rous way. In other words, in really nice 
 society it is considered improper to befuddle 
 all three functional levels of the brain at once. 
 So the rule is: Get drunk on top — on that 
 plane where the fine moral standards of good 
 conduct have been perfected in the years; but 
 keep sober on the middle level — where the 
 speech-function has its home; and, above all, 
 do not paralyze the lowest level which keeps 
 in order the automatic functions of the body. 
 This is the rule in the kind of society a decent 
 man can go about in. One may unbutton 
 morally; but the mental unbuttoning — the 
 physical sprawling of unbraced muscles — is 
 not at all a nice thing and leads ultimately 
 to being thrown out of doors. 
 
 It is in this society — and at this stage of 
 alcoholic impairment — that the social charm of 
 
36 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 drink is most apparent and indeed is at its 
 best. 
 
 Why does an attractive woman seem for 
 the moment — thus flushed and liberated by 
 alcohol — the more attractive to a certain order 
 of intellect? It is because she is indeed free. 
 She is freed from the old moral law of her 
 being. The guardian, who makes his home 
 on the highest brain-level, is drugged and 
 asleep. All the other qualities of the woman 
 flash out, rejoicing in the new-found liberty. 
 The mind tastes the sudden joys of lawless- 
 ness. The emotional nature laughs and takes 
 the air. And what you see is the real female 
 animal, which is a strangely wonderful thing. 
 Here it is — frank as sunlight or running wa- 
 ter. And you watch it as you would a slim, 
 wild colt at play in a meadow. Riderless it 
 runs, without bit or bridle. And makes for 
 fascination. Do you wonder men look at it 
 with approval, in that one glad hour of its 
 lawlessness? This is no longer woman, aspir- 
 ing to perfect the higher part of her nature — 
 working consciously on the upper level, or, it 
 may be, merely yielding to atavistic impulses 
 toward right conduct; she is the female animal, 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 37 
 
 living downward, beautiful and unaware of 
 sin, as a thing that runs lightly in the forest. 
 
 Social charm? 
 
 Of course it is there; but it is there only for 
 the man who has put himself (like Theodore 
 Hook) in approximately the same untrammeled 
 state. For both of them — for him and for 
 her — alcohol must have abolished the higher 
 faculties and moods, if they are to find a com- 
 mon pleasure in companionship. 
 
 iv: 
 
 Quicquid agunt homines — 
 
 All that is done by men in drink — revels 
 of the voluptuous, festivals of triumph, gladia- 
 torship of the wit — has never wanted someone 
 to praise it. No one in our day praises it so 
 lustily as Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton; no one 
 is so eloquent an apologist for the life that 
 is neither sweet nor reasonable, being indeed 
 tumultuous, riotous and full of mirth. He 
 finds in drink, as others have, a blazing ele- 
 ment of excitement — as though it made men 
 sons of the gods, summoned to a high festival. 
 And in verse and prose he has proclaimed the 
 
38 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 essential virtue of strong drink, which is the 
 virtue of placing men on a democratic level 
 of boon-fellowship. If this were true — even 
 though the level were a low one — there might 
 still be a saving truth in the argument. But 
 the altruistic plea is (as you have seen) merely 
 one of the hypocrisies which have grown up 
 round the drink habit. All poison habits (your 
 physician will tell you) are progressive. For 
 the man who drank yesterday there is dis- 
 comfort in abstinence today. It is always true; 
 it is a rule of life; the repetition of a process 
 in which you find pleasure tends to become 
 less and less voluntary. The will gets out 
 of its way. The nervous mechanism acts of 
 its own accord and becomes, as it were, auto- 
 matic. Indeed, it becomes so automatic that 
 desire itself sinks out of sight and an irrele- 
 vant pretext takes its place. And the man 
 who tippled yesterday will tell you he has 
 no desire to drink to-day; not at all; what he 
 wants (he avers) is boon-companionship. The 
 force of habit is on him, but he knows it not. 
 What he thinks he wants is the fellowship of 
 Davidson, Pratt and Bennett, with whom he 
 tippled at his club. He has read himself 
 
WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE MAN 39 
 
 awrong. He has deceived himself. He has 
 misinterpreted a plain physiological impulse 
 into a social want. What he really wants to 
 do is to abate the physical discomfort, due to 
 an unsatisfied, automatic demand of the body 
 for the poison it has come to need. The boon- 
 fellowship of drinking men and women is a 
 lie. It is the excuse for drink and not the 
 cause. Drink does not make for altruism. 
 On the contrary, it sets up a pathological 
 process which gradually destroys altruism. If 
 you glance ahead at the man who has got be- 
 yond his ounce a day, you can see the way 
 the road is trending. In the drunkard the rule 
 of being is selfishness; he will sacrifice every- 
 thing worth while in life for the sake of 
 drink. A prattler and a liar, he is above all 
 a man in whom selfishness is supreme. 
 
 But the beggar, you say, turns first to the 
 drunken man? Barrooms and saloons are 
 haunted by the lassies of the Salvation Army 
 and the pale nuns, questing charity? And the 
 "generosity" of the drunkard is proverbial? 
 It is not altruism. Two things enter into it: 
 the drinker's desire of display and the sheer 
 lack of judgment which makes him give away 
 
40 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 the very money he needs for his drink. Not 
 altruism, then, but imbecility. 
 
 These things, therefore, alcohol does to a 
 man on the higher levels of him. Your most 
 moderate drinker is poisoned at the top. Al- 
 ready his morals are in retreat. 
 
 I am interested in that man — the moderate 
 drinker; and I want to follow him for awhile. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE MODERATE DRINKER 
 
 You may have met this important person, 
 the moderate drinker. In the discussion of 
 the good and ill of alcohol, no one is more 
 conspicuous. A library of books has been 
 written about him. He is the whetstone of 
 every argument. There was never an old 
 family physician who sang the praise of wine 
 and abused the '' unscientific twaddle " of the 
 enemies of alcohol who could not tell you 
 of an esteemed uncle who lived ^' to be within 
 four months of a hundred " and " never drank 
 less than a bottle of port every day of his 
 life." That old gentleman is the famous mod- 
 erate drinker. I have met him in many lands. 
 Sometimes he is indeed old; usually he is 
 young; but there is one extraordinary thing 
 about him — always he is going downstairs. 
 Always he is getting away from that ideal 
 
 41 
 
42 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 state of his; and, if you meet him to-morrow 
 or the next month or the next year, he has 
 ceased to be, in some appreciable degree, as 
 moderate a drinker. This is not an assump- 
 tion. It is a fact. 
 
 I knew a learned old man in Scotland; 1 
 knew him for many years. With unfailing 
 regularity he took his bottle a day — but it was 
 a quart bottle of whisky. In the afternoon 
 he used to jog round his estate on a safe 
 pony; and when day faded out he would come 
 into dinner and his third drink. One dined 
 well in his house, and when the cloth was 
 taken away the servants were called in — from 
 stables, gardens and offices — and the old man 
 read prayers. Then the bottle of whisky and 
 a jug of water were set before him and, filling 
 his glass, he began his moderate drinking. If 
 he had a guest, he had another bottle for the 
 guest — he stood for no poaching on his. So 
 he drank. He had a rare fund of talk, for in 
 his youth he had been a student and a traveler; 
 and always he read books worth discussing. 
 Hour after hour I have listened to his talk, 
 as, automatically, his memory gave up what 
 had been impressed upon it. He had a hard- 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 43 
 
 surfaced, Scottish memory that had retained 
 much he had learned from men and things. 
 It would be eleven o'clock before the intel- 
 ligence went out of him; always at midnight 
 the gardener and one of the house-servants 
 carried him up and put him in his bed. He 
 was a moderate drinker. A score of times 
 he proved it to me — ^with many fine quota- 
 tions from his Latin authors. This was the 
 way of his argument: — 
 
 " There is only one bad thing about drink 
 — the fact that the habit grows on you. Now 
 in order to drink with safety, convenience and 
 delight, all you have to do is to see that the 
 habit does not grow on you. The man who 
 sets a limit — whether it be one glass or one 
 bottle — and keeps within his limit, is a mod- 
 erate drinker. He stays at that one point. I 
 call him," said the old Scottish gentleman, 
 " a moderate drinker. He does not go beyond 
 the limit of moderation he has set for himself. 
 He is drinking the whisky — it is not drinking 
 him." 
 
 I used to think it was a good argument; I 
 still think it is a good argument. The man 
 who says: "I will drink so much" — glass or 
 
44 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 mug, pint or quart — and sticks resolutely to 
 the determination is, one would fancy, a mod- 
 erate drinker. His will is not yet destroyed. 
 At some point it steps in and asserts itself, 
 with its: ^^ Stop here — this is your limit." 
 
 But there is one weak place in the argu- 
 ment — a fatal flaw in the logic. Alcoholism 
 proceeds along two roads. The first is the 
 tendency of the poison-habit to demand larger 
 doses. Assume, if you will, that the moderate 
 drinker places a barrier across this road, dis- 
 plays the sign of: " Thus-far-and-no-further." 
 He will drink only so much and not a gill or 
 thimbleful more. And thus he takes his stand 
 at a fixed point in the downgoing road — the 
 point of moderation. What he overlooks is 
 the significant fact that alcoholism has another 
 way of getting to him. The brain-tissues of 
 the man, the nerve-centers, are not what they 
 were when he began his moderate drinking. 
 They have been progressively impaired. Mor- 
 ally, mentally and physically he has become 
 less and less the man he was, as each dose 
 of alcohol was sent to do its work on the nerv- 
 ous system. He drinks no more, but the drink 
 acts upon weakened and degenerated tissues. 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 45 
 
 Honestly and willfully he has kept to a stated 
 moderate quantity of alcohol, but meanwhile, 
 and with steady progression, the sensitive body, 
 into which he pours the drink, has advanced 
 in alcoholic dissolution. What was moderation 
 yesterday is not moderation to-day. 
 
 And here we have touched the edge of a 
 great truth. 
 
 Moderate drinking is a stage; it is not a fixed 
 point. As the French soldier would say, it is 
 an etape. There is no moderate drinker who 
 is not going on to the next stage of his journey, 
 or who is not turning back. The New York 
 Sun, in one of those sane and witty editorials 
 of which it has the secret, says the '' evils of 
 moderate drinking have not been established 
 to the satisfaction of any but a few reformers," 
 but it takes the iron out of the statement by 
 adding: ^' What does seem to be pretty well 
 established is that few of those who drink can 
 be classed as moderate drinkers." 
 
 Few, or you might say, none; for the mod- 
 erate drinker is either coming or going. He 
 is coming back toward the norm of sobriety, 
 or he is going on toward drunkenness. One 
 or the other. The pathological progress to- 
 
46 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 ward alcoholic degenerations is continuous; it 
 goes regularly on, though the drinking man 
 holds himself grimly to his one bottle a day. 
 And he reaches the same end, though not so 
 quickly, as he who drinks with careless, hope- 
 less immoderation. The moderate drinker 
 takes his tipple at a half-way house. His safety 
 lies in the hope — spes vinosa — that death 
 will get him before he goes further on his 
 journey. 
 
 By temperament and by social convention 
 there are many men and women — more than 
 the Sun fancies, perhaps — who seemingly halt 
 at this half-way house. They are those who 
 have no predisposition to alcoholism; who have 
 no desire for cerebral stimulation; whose mod- 
 eration is so definite that the bodily habit is 
 in its infancy. They may go on for a long 
 time, even to old age, and keep the poison 
 habit at so low a point that slight daily doses 
 may satisfy it. I think there are many such 
 people in whom the progress of the alcohol 
 habit is so leisurely that mind and body go 
 to the grave less deeply scarred than one would 
 fancy; but what is impaired is the finer brain 
 atop — the home of the moral qualities. That 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 47 
 
 price the most moderate drinker pays. His 
 moral deterioration is very subtle; in a world 
 where right conduct is still an unachieved 
 ideal it is not notoriously perceptible; but, 
 great or small, it is the price he pays. 
 
 II 
 
 After all, what is a moderate drinker? 
 
 The " navvy's " moderation in gin-drinking 
 is not that of the college don sipping his port. 
 Bernard Shaw has pointed out that as '' most 
 people seem to prefer the boozy sort of life " 
 so '^ society is organized to suit boozy people." 
 The doctors have, for the most part, fallen 
 in with society's ways; hence their estimate 
 of what is moderation in the drinking of fer- 
 mented liquors is anything but niggardly. For 
 years they regulated the daily allowance of 
 alcohol — for the moderate drinker — by what 
 was called ^' Anstie's limit." 
 
 According to Anstie, the right quantity is 
 " equivalent to one and a half ounces of alco- 
 hol; three ounces of ardent spirit; two wine- 
 glasses of port; one pint bottle of claret, cham- 
 pagne or other light wine; three tumblerfuls 
 
48 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 of ale or porter; or four or five glasses of light 
 ale or beer." 
 
 The life insurance offices used to accept this 
 calculation. Only when Anstie's amount was 
 exceeded did they see a risk to health. Those 
 were the days when doctors talked (cheerily 
 ignorant) of alcohol as a '^ food." Never did 
 the moderate drinker stand so high in the 
 world's esteem. Indeed, the total abstainer was 
 looked upon as a maniac who was playing a 
 dangerous, suicidal game with his health. One 
 of these obstinate non-drinkers, a Quaker, ap- 
 plied to an English life insurance office for a 
 policy. The directors held a meeting; the 
 learned doctors were called in; and this was 
 the decision: the policy would be granted 
 only if the Quaker paid ten per cent, more 
 than the ordinary premium, because ^' he was 
 thin and watery and mentally cranked in that 
 he repudiated the good things of God as 
 found in alcoholic drinks." This was in 1840; 
 life insurance was a new thing, based on 
 the general average of medical and finan- 
 cial ignorance. (The Quaker annoyed 
 the prophets by living until he was eighty- 
 two.) 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 49 
 
 In the three-quarters of a century that have 
 elapsed something has been learned. A con- 
 vention of the Presidents of the American life 
 insurance companies was held in New York 
 in 1914 and the chairman of the Central Bu- 
 reau of Medico-Actuarial Mortality Investi- 
 gation, representing forty-three companies and 
 covering the records of over two million policy- 
 holders, made a report in which he classed 
 moderate drinkers as ^' decidedly unsafe and 
 exhibiting a higher mortality than total 
 abstainers." 
 
 Of course; the physiologist could have told 
 him so in the beginning; but it took seventy- 
 four years of investigation — economic, socio- 
 logical, medical, ethical — to convince the 
 Medico-Actuarial man of the plain fact that 
 alcohol, even in minute, moderate quantities, 
 is a destructive poison. 
 
 So long as medical science — so long as the 
 old-fashioned doctor, living hazily ^' the boozy 
 sort of life " — gave approval to moderate 
 drinking and '' Anstie's limit," the reformers 
 had a hard time of it. Business life, as well 
 as social life, was ^^ organized to suit boozy 
 people." Now you are not going to destroy 
 
50 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 the pandemic plague — if you want to call it 
 that — of alcohol until you get both the social 
 organization and the business world on your 
 side. What was most vehemently done in the 
 past was to attack the alcohol habit on its 
 social side. There has been an immense 
 amount of emotional eloquence poured out on 
 the evil wrought by alcohol upon the social 
 structure. That was good work in its way. 
 Pictures of the drunkard's home — its squalor 
 and cruelty — doubtless frightened many a man 
 from drink. And photographs (displayed on 
 a screen) of the moderate drinker's indecent 
 liver did something to turn men to sober, 
 euthenic ways of living. But the battle against 
 alcohol could not be won in this way. You 
 cannot fight a poison habit with rhetoric or 
 with pictures on a screen. You cannot frighten 
 a man away from a social peril by appealing 
 to his sense of fear. The best and starkest 
 kind of man goes forward to meet the fear 
 and put it to the test. Youth is not to be 
 daunted by a picture of the hobnailed 
 liver. You cannot terrorize a boy — in the 
 forth-going valor of his youth — with proph- 
 ecies of the madhouse or the cell. He knows 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 51 
 
 he is not going there; he has taken, he 
 would tell you, the safe road of the moderate 
 drinker. 
 
 It was not until ^' big business " — cold- 
 blooded, unsentimental, mathematical, rigidly 
 scientific — stepped in and told him that mod- 
 erate drinking was not safe, being, in the 
 Medico-Actuarial phrase, '^ decidedly unsafe," 
 that he was content to listen. Then he said: 
 ^^ There must be something in it." 
 
 You can see him going jauntily into the life 
 insurance office. 
 
 " It's all right," he says confidently, " I'm 
 a moderate drinker — I can drink and be 
 sober — in fact, I keep well within Anstie's 
 limit." 
 
 ^^ Anstie's limit," says the Medico-Actuarial 
 one scornfully — ^^ that belongs to the dark ages 
 of medical science, to a period when society 
 was organized to suit boozy people. Let's have 
 a look at you! " 
 
 And with phlegmatic immodesty Medico- 
 Actuarial science goes through him with a 
 lighted candle — peering at his lungs and lights 
 and liver, at heart and brain — notably at the 
 brain and its functional levels; then throws 
 
52 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 him out or bets (in terms of insurance) that 
 he will live so many alcoholic years and no 
 more. I am assuming that this young man 
 was not in an extra-hazardous way of life. 
 Had he belonged to the following classes 
 he had never got so far as the examination 
 room, in the more conservative insurance 
 offices : 
 
 '^ Retail liquor dealers — not accepted. 
 
 ^' Employees in distilleries — not accepted. 
 
 " Saloon-keepers and bartenders — not ac- 
 cepted. 
 
 '' Traveling salesmen for liquor houses — not 
 accepted. 
 
 ^' Only in special cases are wholesale dealers 
 and restaurant keepers, who sell liquor, ac- 
 cepted." 
 
 And the list might be extended, for brewery 
 salesmen, collectors, mechanics, bottlers, labor- 
 ers and the like are heavily penalized when 
 they take out life-insurance policies. 
 
 In the report of the Bureau of Mortality 
 Investigation to which I have referred (it 
 was published in the Outlook) this state- 
 ment is made, concerning the moderate 
 drinker: 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 53 
 
 "With regard to men who had used alco- 
 holic beverages daily, but not to excess, the 
 experience of the companies was divided into 
 two groups: (a) men who took two glasses 
 of beer, or a glass of whisky, or their equiva- 
 lent a day; (b) men who took more than the 
 foregoing amount, but were not considered by 
 the companies to drink to excess. The mor- 
 tality in the second group was fifty per cent, 
 greater than in the first." 
 
 Here you get a comparison between two 
 classes of drinkers — both moderate, both within 
 the risk limits set by the company; yet the 
 man who took a few extra glasses, beer or 
 whisky, paid for it, on an average, with four 
 years of his life. These are interesting facts 
 and they are significant because they are those 
 upon which " big business " — as you shall see 
 — has based its campaign against drink. A 
 comparison between the moderate drinker — for 
 no other drinker is, of course, accepted by the 
 insurance offices — and the abstainer, is found 
 in the reports of the British companies, which 
 I take from the same source. 
 
 Here are the figures for the moderate drink- 
 ing men: 
 
54 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 Total number of years of exposure to 
 
 risk, all ages 466,943 
 
 Expected deaths by Om table 8,91 1 
 
 Actual deaths 8,947 
 
 Per cent, of actual to expected 100.4 
 
 And here are those for the abstainers: 
 
 Total number of years of exposure to 
 
 risk 398,010 
 
 Expected deaths by Om table 6,899 
 
 Actual deaths 5? 124 
 
 Per cent, of actual to expected 74.3 
 
 What was the scientific expectation? Of 
 the moderate drinkers 8,911 were due to die; 
 they paid in 36 lives more than were ex- 
 pected. On the other hand, 6,899 abstainers 
 were statistically expected to die; and 1,775 
 simply refused to keep the appointment — and 
 went on living. You can figure it out; the 
 differences between the percentages of actual 
 deaths to expected deaths, as between drink- 
 ers and non-drinkers, was 21.6 per cent.; the 
 death-rate for drinkers was 35 per cent, 
 higher than it was for non-drinkers — which 
 makes for thought. On an average the mod- 
 erate drinker pays from ten to thirteen years of 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 55 
 
 his life for the pleasure he gets out of his 
 small tipples of beer or wine or whisky. 
 
 Thus speaks Medico-Actuarial science, cold- 
 blooded, stating the statistical facts. 
 
 As I have said, their interest, for me, lies in 
 the discovery that ^^ big business " has pond^ed 
 them to some purpose. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Whether *^ big business " is cold-blooded or 
 not is beside the point. It is certainly scien- 
 tific. What it tries to do, with scientific accu- 
 racy and mathematical exactness, is to get the 
 best it can out of man and machine. Mr. 
 Henry Ford, a prominent manager for '^ big 
 business," says that he looks upon '^ the man as 
 tremendously more important than the ma- 
 chine." 
 
 Altruism? Possibly. But you are not to 
 take the word altruism in its frothier and more 
 sentimental sense. Mr. Ford is one of those 
 entirely sane men, " functioning " — to quote 
 the psychologist — " with perfect co-ordination 
 upon all the three brain-levels." He is sane 
 on top and for such a man moral sanity shows 
 
S6 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 itself in respect for human life and sympathy 
 with human suffering. It is a need of his 
 altruistic nature to set the man above the ma- 
 chine. Therefore, when one of his laborers 
 goes wrong, he does not throw him out on the 
 trash-heap of life. He does for the human 
 machine what he would do for the thing of 
 copper and steel; he calls in experts who do 
 their best to set it right. When a man in 
 the Ford factories is found to be out of order 
 from having absorbed alcoholic poison — or 
 fiercer drugs — he is sent to a repair shop and 
 refitted for use. As you suggested, Mr. Ford's 
 original impulse may have been altruistic; but 
 I am inclined to think he finds it good busi- 
 ness. A workman trained to his work is worth 
 saving, just as it is folly to " scrap " a machine 
 when there is still efficiency in it. 
 
 Of course, any manufacturer would prefer 
 machines that did not need tinkering; and 
 sooner or later the defective one will be cast 
 aside. For a while, however, it is worth re- 
 pairing; it repays the infinite care expended 
 on it. And what is true of the complicated 
 machine is true, in a higher degree, of the 
 trained workman. Yet the time comes in- 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 57 
 
 evitably, when the warped and dirt-clogged ma- 
 chine is ^' scrapped " — the warped and poisoned 
 man thrown on the trash-heap. 
 
 The moderate drinker, who shortens his 
 working-life from ten to thirteen years, is not 
 a good economic investment. That is what 
 '^ big business " has discovered. And in spite 
 of their sane and humane desire to help the 
 under-dog — to make efficient the defective man 
 — the managers of '^ big business " have found 
 they cannot afford to employ the drinker. The 
 drunkard has been exiled from the world of 
 affairs; the moderate drinker is in the way of 
 following him. Already he is a negligible 
 factor in the world's work. 
 
 I would state the case fairly. 
 
 There are still fields of opportunity for 
 the drinker, even for the drunkard, here and 
 there. One of them I have in mind. It lies 
 up in the bleak and windy hills of New Eng- 
 land. There a sober man has a large farm. 
 He employs many men; but he will accept no 
 man who is not a drunkard. Wages he does 
 not pay, but he gives his laborers board and 
 lodging and all the hard cider they want to 
 drink. Apples grow thick in his windy or- 
 
58 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 chards and out of them he crushes a potent 
 alcoholic cider — a score of barrels a year. 
 When age is on it, it is a frightful, nerve- 
 gripping and heady drink. You will see his 
 helots going afield in the morning, each with 
 his can of it. 
 
 Where do they come from, these cider- 
 boys? 
 
 They are young for the most part, a sulky 
 and weedy lot of loose-stepping lads. (The 
 beverage is one that makes for sulkiness, and 
 begets emaciation — not the bloat of beer.) 
 They are not the Yankees native to the hills. 
 They seem to have come up from the little 
 cities and manufacturing towns. Their time 
 of moderate drinking belongs to a dirty, youth- 
 poisoned past in streets of brick and stone and 
 wood. They are not part of the hills. Had not 
 the shrewd and evil Yankee farmer discovered 
 how to get a by-product out of this wreckage 
 of life, they had died naturally in the cells or 
 madhouses of their cities. Here they die 
 drunk in the hills. You see them by day, plod- 
 ding about their dingy toil — ridding the lean 
 fields of their yearly crop of stones; flogging 
 the wretched farm-horses along the furrows; 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 59 
 
 tossing hay or humoring the tough soil, where 
 the potatoes grow painfully — stopping now and 
 then to tilt the can of acrid cider. 
 
 And by night you hear them — you hear their 
 hoarse clamoring in the hills, or their wild 
 cries as they reel along the moon-white roads. 
 
 This is one of the few economic uses to 
 which the drunkard can still be put — drunken 
 slavery on the hills of wind and stone. In a 
 society which is being organized less and less 
 " to suit boozy people " there are few other 
 places for him. Nor are there many of these 
 refuges left. Even for the wastrel and the 
 scamp the end does not seem a desirable one; 
 but the drunkard who would still keep an eco- 
 nomic place in the world can look for none 
 other. Slave to a Yankee peasant — chained by 
 poverty and drink — his bed straw and his 
 food pig — his death a derision; it is a bad 
 destiny even for a drunkard; but it is about 
 the best he can find in a society that is organiz- 
 ing itself for sober people. 
 
 The drunkard is negligible. 
 
 He has long since been eliminated from the 
 ranks of business. The tipsy carpenter and the 
 tipsy clerk have gone the way of the tipsy 
 
6o DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 " statesman " and the drunken lawyer and 
 boozy prize-fighter. (Even green reporters, 
 bearding ill-tempered statesmanship, do not do 
 it on the hazy ''courage" of champagne.) 
 
 From an economic viewpoint the drunkard is 
 non-existent. What '' big business " is fighting 
 to-day is '' moderate drinking " — the ounce-and- 
 a-half-a-day kind of thing. With the exception 
 of those connected with the trade in alcoholic 
 drinks — and their hangers-on — the entire world 
 of business and industry is lined up against 
 alcohol, and the battle (since drunkenness is 
 self-confessed defeat) is being waged against 
 moderate drinking. It is with the man who can 
 drink and be sober, thank Heaven! that in- 
 dustry is picking a quarrel. The physiologist 
 has shown that he is morally defective — poisoned 
 atop ; the Medico-Actuarial man has shown that 
 he is physically depleted, warped, defective, 
 and throws away from ten to thirteen years of 
 his imperfect life; and "big business" has 
 learned that economically he is so bad an in- 
 vestment that only in rare cases is it worth 
 while to bother with tinkering and repairing 
 him. 
 
 In your own city, in your own town, what- 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 6i 
 
 soever of '' big business " abides there has put 
 its ban on alcohol. The Pennsylvania Railroad 
 Company employs only non-drinking men; and 
 it has stopped the sale of liquor in all property 
 owned by it. What this company has done all 
 the great employers of labor have done — the 
 list would fill many pages of this book. One 
 of them, the American Car and Foundry Com- 
 pany, has gone so far that it will employ no 
 man who has even signed a liquor-dealer's ap- 
 plication for a license, showing thus a sneaking 
 kindness for the thing, even though he does 
 not drink it himself. Nor was labor much 
 slower to act than capital. Many labor unions 
 have barred intoxicating liquors from their 
 meetings and entertainments, making thus a 
 stand for sobriety even upon occasions of good- 
 fellowship and outside of working hours. They 
 are lining up with the economic law and with 
 the best thought of the day. 
 
 How long can the moderate drinker face 
 successfully this battle-line? 
 
 Not long; almost everything is against him. 
 And that world-power. Public Opinion, is 
 against him. There is nothing so amazing, I 
 think, as the attitude toward drink of the press 
 
62 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 of the country. In Pennsylvania alone thirty- 
 eight newspapers bar all liquor advertisements. 
 In other states five hundred and twenty im- 
 portant daily journals keep to the same rule. 
 But more noteworthy is what the newspapers 
 have to say for themselves. In leaders and 
 cartoons, in verses and special articles, the far- 
 flung and vehement Hearst newspapers print 
 daily sermons against drink. A prize-fighter, 
 like " Jess " Willard, sets himself to tell in 
 print the story of his career in the '^ ring " and 
 his articles turn out to be smashing arguments 
 for total abstinence from alcoholic drink. The 
 baseball players are total abstainers, if they 
 are successful ones like " Ty " Cobb and Col- 
 lins, Mclnnis and Barry and ^' Home-Run " 
 Baker; and the newspapers never weary of 
 iterating the fact. The press of the day, echo- 
 ing public opinion, reads like an old-fashioned 
 temperance exhortation. And it means one 
 thing: Society is no longer ''organized for 
 boozy people." The entire social fabric is 
 trying to clean away the alcoholic dust and 
 rust which have clogged and befouled and 
 hampered it. 
 
 Slowly but irresistibly the tide is setting to- 
 
THE MODERATE DRINKER 63 
 
 ward the sober way of life. Mankind has 
 found that the science of eugenics, which is 
 the science of being well born, was worth study- 
 ing; and now it is finding that the science 
 of euthenics, which is that of right living, is 
 of equal — and more immediate — importance. 
 Firmly, in multitudinous voices, mankind is 
 asserting the will to be sober. Voices from 
 the factory and the prison, from the play-field 
 and the home, demand the right to sanity of 
 body and mind. Against this formidable out- 
 cry the voice of the " old family physician," 
 over his bottle of port, rises small and thin. 
 The world is entering the sober way of life. 
 And the moderate drinker must face about and 
 march with it — or be left behind, among the 
 defectives, the ineffectives, exiles from their 
 generation. 
 
 All moderate drinkers? 
 
 Each in his degree; for alcohol is a poison 
 and, just in proportion to what he takes of it, 
 the moderate drinker is degraded from his 
 normal state; and by every repetition of the 
 dose the degradation is automatically increased. 
 The statement is axiomatic. He is not stand- 
 ing still at a mythical half-way house — he is 
 
64 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 going on. Even though he does knock ten or 
 thirteen years off his life, the chances are he 
 will be thrown on the trash-heap before death 
 steps in, compassionately, and takes him. Eco- 
 nomically there is no place for him. And, 
 since he is morally — if not mentally — impaired, 
 society, striving for sanity, looks upon him with- 
 out approbation. 
 
 He's the one-legged man in the race. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 WINE AND BEER AND THEIR LITTLE 
 RURAL BROTHER 
 
 Jack London, thinking of himself (which is 
 misdirected genius), wrote a quasi-biographical 
 book, '^John Barleycorn." Its purpose was to 
 show the way drink had with him. It was 
 written in his powerful and angular prose; and, 
 like his other books, with its fitfulness, its 
 flashiness and shouting emphasis, seemed less 
 a piece of literature than the improvisation of 
 a man of genius. But it was a rare and good 
 book; being made rare and good by its sin- 
 cerity. It showed you the boy he was, in what 
 must have been a rather barbaric California. 
 In the first scene he was a tiny, roistering child, 
 swaggering off with his adult, Spanish-blooded 
 companions to a dance; and the child, in savage 
 emulation, drank the crude and heady wine of 
 that country until he fell at death's door. 
 
 65 
 
66 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 (Some brown girl, if I remember, dragged 
 him back to life.) A little later you see him, 
 still a boy, taking his beer — always in the 
 bravado of boon-fellowship — at the 'longshore 
 taverns of a desperate city on the Western 
 ocean. What promise he was making to the 
 future you can see, for the quasi-biography of 
 his book sends him rioting down the road of 
 drink. It was a wild career, for his life ran 
 fierce and swift and touched high and difficult 
 places. 
 
 You will say that Jack London, being a man 
 of genius — genius rather lawless it may be — 
 cannot be taken as a criterion for the normal, 
 duller man. You will add that the stimulant 
 habit — like certain poison plants — flourishes 
 most in an over-rich soil. All of which may 
 be true. The difference, however, is merely 
 one of degree. The way of the boy in ^' John 
 Barleycorn " is the way of every man who 
 drinks — bar those unhappy victims of heredity, 
 who come into life with vitiated brains (such 
 an one is Oswald, in '^ Ghosts," who lives a 
 half-told tale). The way is the same, the be- 
 ginning thereof and the end. 
 
 It is a maxim^ melancholy in its veracity, that 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 67 
 
 the road to drunkenness is paved with mild 
 stimulants. 
 
 Unless he is a lunatic, no one begins by 
 drinking spirits. The mere physical conscience 
 revolts against the indignity. The stomachic 
 conscience turns over in disgust. It is only 
 when alcohol is forced into it in pleasanter 
 wine-y ways — in suaver disguises of malt — that 
 Nature compromises, saying: '' Oh, well, if you 
 insist! " 
 
 Nature is always amenable to compromise; 
 it is her supreme law to preserve existence at 
 any cost; and she prolongs the poisoned life by 
 adapting the organism to the exigencies of 
 abnormal habit. Gradually she learns to accept 
 the alcoholic doses in the beer or the wine; and 
 slowly she hardens the physical conscience — it 
 was what Mithridates did — until it can take its 
 brandy neat. And there is no other way of 
 making a drinker; no other method of making 
 a drunkard; it must be done gradually and by 
 degrees — or the physical conscience will belch 
 a frightful protest. 
 
 Social environment, whether of the " greaser " 
 festa^ or the 'longshore tavern; this, and a 
 slowly progressive accustoming of the bodily 
 
6S DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 system to the action of the alcoholic poison, 
 are the normal methods of perfecting a sea- 
 soned drinking man. 
 
 In the quasi-biography of " John Barley- 
 corn " you see both methods conjunctly at work; 
 that is why I have taken the book as an illus- 
 tration, but the life of any man would serve 
 as well. 
 
 I remember — ^who does not remember such 
 things? — a man I knew at the famous old Uni- 
 versity of Jena in Germany. He was young; 
 he was calm; and he had come into Germany 
 from an American college, where drink was 
 not a compulsory roaring part of the curricu- 
 lum — it was, as you might say, " elective " ; and 
 had a furtive, low-browed way of consorting 
 with rake-helly gamblers and fellows of the 
 baser sort. When he got to Jena he joined a 
 student-corps. It was not alone that he wanted 
 to get his cheeks scarred with saber-cuts and 
 to boast — like his fellow-students — a monstrous 
 belly; he was clubbable, as well, and wanted 
 boon-companionship. The club of the '' corps " 
 was his 'longshore tavern. So he was taken in 
 and, being a mere fuchs, was put to the test 
 of the beer-duel. It was a pale beer they drank 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 69 
 
 in tall wooden mugs, a pint deep. And when 
 the beery president (a tun of a man) challenged 
 him, with an ^' Kins, zwei, drei! " he set the 
 measure to his lips and drank manfully; but 
 what gullet had he to drink against that tun of 
 a man, down whose throat the beer ran torrent- 
 wise? He had not got a gill down before the 
 president turned up, exultantly, an empty mug. 
 They jeered the defeated fuchs and sang songs 
 about him — there in the ancient smoky hall of 
 the corps — and filled him his mug again. And 
 after every song up started some beer-soaked 
 student in kanonen-stiefel, and challenged him 
 anew to the duel. Ten defeats, twenty defeats, 
 saddened him; and he loved the derisive, fat 
 president less than any man he knew. So in 
 desperate bravado (as John Barleycorn swigged 
 at the wine of the festa) he summoned the pale, 
 sweaty knabe who served the drink. 
 
 " Bring a quart of brandy," said he. 
 
 The corps sat silent, lifting fat-lidded eyelids 
 in a common query. 
 
 Slowly he brimmed his wooden mug with 
 brandy — a pint of it; then he went to the head 
 of the table where the huge president swelled 
 in his chair. Slowly he poured a pint of 
 
70 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 brandy into that man's mug. Then he chal- 
 lenged him, with an eins, zwei, drei! and, clos- 
 ing his desperate eyes, he drank his own mad 
 drink. His physical conscience was stricken 
 dead with amazement and heaved no protest. 
 The drink went down. A faint noise of cheers 
 — incredibly far off — rang in his ears; then he 
 fell — dead as his physical conscience — dead — 
 in all the glory of the white-gallooned uniform 
 of his corps and the truculent kanonen-stiefel, 
 as ever drunkard fell. What clamorous wel- 
 come they gave him to the Saxon corps he 
 knew not at all; nor the procession, wherein 
 they bore him shoulder-high, through the mid- 
 night streets of the old town, to his chambers 
 in the Holz-markt; these things he knew not, 
 but he woke to the cold and greasy light of 
 a winter dawn. He was on the couch in his 
 study, booted and cloaked, like a warrior taking 
 his rest. He started up abruptly, for he had 
 heard the reveille of his physical conscience — 
 rumbling its despairing: ^' We can't get 'im 
 up, we can't get 'im up, this mornin'." An 
 interlude; a duel in which physical conscience 
 won. And empty he went out into the empty 
 town. Overhead a queasy dawn flapped to and 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 71 
 
 fro like a ghostly flag. Just such a dawn was 
 in his brain, but foggier. And he took to the 
 road. A long road, a naked road, the road 
 that leads to Weimar, a road of fourteen miles, 
 with haggard plum-trees dancing along the 
 side of it. In an hour, in three hours, in five 
 hours (for there was no time) he came to the 
 ruins of an old castle. It was the castle of 
 Goena; and he sat upon a rock, gloomily, as 
 Job sat upon the dunghill of his thoughts and 
 scratched himsel' wi' a broken pot. How long 
 he sat there he did not know, for, as I have 
 said, there was no time. Suddenly he looked 
 up into a pair of pale-blue eyes. 
 
 The eyes were on a level with his nose, as 
 he crouched there in his Job-like attitude. 
 They belonged to a small, weather-beaten little 
 girl in a ragged cloak. She was bare of leg 
 and head; and she carried, like some outcast 
 and vagabond fairy, a mysterious wand. Be- 
 hind her loitered, victims of the wand, a flock 
 of grey geese. The student and the goose-girl 
 stared at each other. Curiosity in her eyes 
 gave way to sympathy. 
 
 '^What's the matter with you?" she asked. 
 
 He wagged his head drearily (like Job) and 
 
72 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 even as he moved it his physical conscience 
 (down in the hold) stirred uneasily. 
 
 " YouVe been sitting here for two hours like 
 a stone — lieber Gottf '' she said. 
 
 '' I think," said he, and the words tasted 
 like a forgotten promise, " that I am hungry.'' 
 
 The little girl knew what hunger was; she 
 said '^ ach so!" and laid down her wand, but 
 she still looked like a fairy as she opened her 
 cloak, untied a pocket in her petticoat and 
 produced a piece of black bread. 
 
 The man did not want her dinner; but was 
 there a place where food could be bought? 
 She pointed to a peasant's house down the road, 
 where her master dwelt. 
 
 " I don't dare to take you!" said the goose- 
 girl, " but if you've got money it will be all 
 right." 
 
 She picked up her wand and waved it, per- 
 haps, for in some witchcrafty way the student 
 found himself in the peasant's cottage; and he 
 was sitting at a wooden table in front of a 
 stone vessel filled with acrid beer; and, from 
 the noonday pot, a blowsy woman was bring- 
 ing him the oily thigh of a goose that swam 
 in a dish of bubbling grease. 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 73 
 
 Hungry? He was empty as a drum. 
 Thirsty? He was parched as a bean. He 
 would have given the kanonen-stiefel off his 
 legs for a fill of food and drink. And he lifted 
 the mug — 
 
 At the mere gesture his physical con- 
 science got to its feet and reelingly protested. 
 "Down!" he whispered, but it would not 
 down, until he took it out of doors into the 
 wintry air. Still empty he plodded back along 
 the naked road to Jena — and from afar the 
 goose-girl watched him as he went. 
 
 Now, what I would have you heedfully no- 
 tice in this adventure of the physical conscience 
 is this: Nobly and resolutely it sounded its 
 warnings, as it always does. It said: "Of 
 course, you feel like the deuce and all — alcohol 
 did it — I won't have it — take it away!" It 
 had risen in violent protest against that mad 
 drench of fifty-per-cent.-alcohol brandy. (It 
 was by error that it included fat goose in its 
 protest; and from that day to this — if he is still 
 alive — that young man could never look at 
 goose, boiled in its grease, or fried in its 
 fat, without a twinge of the stomachic con- 
 science.) Had the student gone slowly and 
 
74 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 methodically about the business of drugging 
 his physical conscience with small doses of 
 alcohol in beer — if, unheeding the first warn- 
 ings, he had forced the beer in, little by little — 
 Nature would have compromised. She would 
 have done her best to adapt the organism to 
 the exigencies of the abnormal habit. In time 
 she had not only tolerated the alien intruder, 
 she had admitted a degrading and persistent 
 need of him. And at that point your man had 
 reached the alcohol habit. This methodical 
 way of adding small dose to small dose is the 
 only manner in which a sane man can prepare 
 himself to be a drunkard. Violent drenches 
 of alcohol merely turn the stomach over in 
 disgust. One must pave the road to drunken- 
 ness with mild stimulants. Instinct furiously 
 resists a sudden alcoholic raid. One must cheat 
 Nature by the modest advances, seemingly 
 harmless, of perfumed wines and mild-faced 
 beers; and then, when one has crept to close 
 quarters, one can knock her about the head 
 and have his will of her. 
 
 Every drunkard has begun with wine and 
 beer; never, in a normal man, did Nature pri- 
 marily accept alcohol save in its most veiled 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 75 
 
 and delicate disguises. Boys and women, in 
 their clean-stomached, sensitive way, always go 
 in for the sweetest wines, when they begin to 
 drink. It is inevitable; it is nature's law. 
 
 Therefore, if you will, let us have word with 
 wine and beer; not overlooking that little alco- 
 holic, rural brother of the twain, cider. 
 
 II 
 
 The greater part of my life I have lived in 
 wine countries, attracted not by the casks in 
 the cellars, but by the sun overhead. France, 
 Italy, Spain — they have an implacable charm, 
 which it is difficult to define save in terms of 
 sunlight, wine and song. Sunlight sifting 
 through the olive-trees, or gilding the chest- 
 nuts; songs echoing in the night; the must 
 foaming under brown feet or the wine, brood- 
 ing mysteriously in dark cellars — brooding 
 there, or sent round in great flagons to set a 
 village dancing mad — these are the things that 
 haunt the memory of one who has spent dec- 
 ades of his life in the land where the vines 
 grow. Always one remembers the best of life; 
 the dirty and tragic parts slip out of mind. Of 
 
76 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 one's youth, for instance, one keeps in memory 
 not what was wild and sad and dirty, but what 
 was best and sweetest; until a haze of vague 
 poetry covers it. 
 
 And so with the wine lands. Go to the real 
 facts of life — banish the haze of poetic fancy — 
 and what you see is not the cannikin-clinking 
 merriment of comic opera, but a sadder, drear- 
 ier way of life. 
 
 I am speaking of lands where the grapes 
 grow, where wine is ^^ natural, pure and cheap." 
 It is there at its best. The alcohol, always a 
 poison, is, in its least harmful form, concealed 
 in the beneficent juice of the grape — hidden in 
 suavity and perfume. And what it does to 
 the race of men, dwellers in sunlight, you know; 
 for you have shuddered at these crippled and 
 distorted generations, with their beggars and 
 idiots, bearing one and all — to the eye of the 
 physiologist — the stigmata of alcoholic pen- 
 alties. 
 
 No drunkenness in Southern Europe? 
 
 He who makes that statement speaks out of 
 deep ignorance. He has never dwelt in the 
 villages of Provence, or wandered over the 
 white roads of Italy. You do not, I admit, 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 77 
 
 see so wild and manifest a drunkenness as in 
 the harsh, northern, spirit-drinking lands; but 
 the southern drinker, making up in quantity 
 what was wanting in the alcoholic strength of 
 his beverage, reaches the same stage of physical 
 impairment, begets the same poisoned offspring, 
 dies in the same kind of alcoholic dissolution — 
 to use the technical phrase. His moral corrup- 
 tion, as his physical degeneration, is slower in 
 its progress; but statistics might be piled hos- 
 pital-high to show it reaches the same end. 
 
 Spain was '^ sober Spain " when it was pov- 
 erty-stricken Spain; Italy was sober when her 
 peasants were too poor to drink the wine they 
 made; in France sobriety went with frugality. 
 What is the meaning of that? Simply this: 
 Wine-drinking has always made for drunken- 
 ness; the check on excess was merely want of 
 opportunity. The vice grows by what it feeds 
 upon. Alcohol taken in w^ine breeds the same 
 disease of mind and body that it breeds in its 
 more fiery disguises. And the habit demands 
 stronger doses, more persistent stimulation. In 
 forty years, for which the statistics were kept, 
 the consumption of alcohol in France was* 
 tripled. This was in the old wine-drinking 
 
78 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 days. But your nation is like a man; it is the 
 macrocosmic twin of man; and the wine habit 
 led straight to stronger ways of drink. It 
 was in my horoscope to watch for twenty years 
 the growth of the alcohol habit in France. I 
 saw the nation weary of the too feeble intoxi- 
 cant of wine and take to strong drink. During 
 those years the drinking of absinthe alone rose 
 from an annual consumption of one million 
 gallons to over five million gallons. The wine- 
 shops of Provence, as I knew them in my green 
 youth — the shady arbor and the dancing-floor — 
 vanished quite; in their places were dreary 
 cafes, the shelves lined with gaudy bottles of 
 aperitifs — high-colored, swift-acting decoctions 
 of alcohol. The French race, with dangerous 
 deterioration, turned from the slow poison of 
 wine to the fiercer and more active of alcohol 
 poisons — to the wilder alcohol of amers and 
 absinthes. 
 
 (With what fine spiritual energy, born of 
 battle-peril, France drew herself back from the 
 abyss of racial degeneration, you shall see; but 
 assuredly she was going — even as the wine-boy 
 is making for whisky drunkenness — toward the 
 alcoholic deterioration which is national death. 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 79 
 
 Shall I say she was saved by the scarlet and 
 terrible energies of war? I shall not say 
 it here.) 
 
 Let there be no doubt about it: the wine way 
 to drunkenness is a way like any other. You 
 say it is cleaner, with gayer prospects and 
 brighter skies? Nine-tenths of that is cant and 
 the cheap apologia of second-rate, brandy- 
 loosened poets. It is not a clean way; if you 
 have followed the trail of the wine-drunkard, 
 home-faring: The drunkard of ancient Rome 
 was your real wine-drunkard; in order to get 
 into his bodily system all the alcohol he craved 
 he had to have his vomitorium — that the pioison 
 might force its way to his brain in relays. 
 
 I say that the w^ine-drinker differs no whit 
 from any other drinker of alcohol. His at- 
 tempt to poetize his vice — a vice which has, too, 
 its pathology — is only a kind of apologetic 
 hypocrisy. And take this: In this day no man 
 drinks only wine. 
 
 The last man who claimed to be a " Bur- 
 gundy man " died a few years ago in Nice — 
 his blood-vessels exploding with amazing sud- 
 denness and drenching with alcoholized blood 
 his shining dinner-table, his little daughter and 
 
8o DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 his guests. He was a dear man, for all his 
 clouded brain and twitching tempers, but his 
 boast of being a " Burgundy man " was sheer 
 rubbish; the Burgundy was merely a fat, red 
 parenthesis between the morning ^' bracers " 
 and the midnight spirit cups. 
 
 He was like another; wine was his pass-key 
 to spirits. 
 
 The other day I was given a statement, is- 
 sued by a California viticulturist; I was asked 
 to read it; and I read it. You may care to look 
 at the more attractive part of it, for it is typical 
 • — in its adroitness, in its pocket-appeal and its 
 hypocrisy — of the literature the wine-artificers 
 are sending abroad. Read here: — 
 
 ^' The viticultural industry of California has 
 increased from year to year, and it has now 
 reached a point where it produces from forty 
 to fifty million gallons of fine wine per annum 
 — but this is a mere bagatelle to what the wine 
 industry would become in the future if it were 
 fostered. We see that Italy and France, each 
 having about the same extent of territory as 
 California, produce over 1,000,000,000 gallons 
 of wine each year, from which they derive in 
 the neighborhood of $200,000,000 per annum — 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 8i 
 
 and giving employment to several million 
 people. 
 
 ^' Now California has the same soil and 
 sunny clime as possessed by those two great 
 wine-producing countries, so that when our 
 good American people will be accustomed to 
 the use of the delicious juice of the grape at 
 their meals, following the example set by the 
 wine countries of Europe, both by old and 
 young, then this state will be able also to pro- 
 duce 1,000,000,000 gallons of wine per annum, 
 which will give a production of about $200,- 
 000,000, and by which we will be able to turn 
 our sheep ranges into valuable vineyard prop- 
 erties, creating new towns and cities, and giving 
 employment to several million happy families 
 in this state, after the methods employed by the 
 grape-growing countries of Europe. 
 
 '' In order to arrive at this stage of develop- 
 ment we must do as the families in Europe — 
 add a little wine to the glass of water for the 
 children — educate them to use wine at their 
 meals, and in so doing we will achieve two 
 great blessings by removing the two greatest 
 evils with which our country is afflicted — 
 drunkenness and prohibition — for it is a well- 
 
 \5t%5 
 
82 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 known fact that in the countries where every 
 man, woman and child use wine at their meals, 
 drunkenness is almost unknown." 
 
 The two familiar lies; as to the economic lie 
 I shall have more than a little to say. For the 
 moment let us leave the viticulturist's dream 
 of ^' sheep-ranches turned into vineyards " and 
 the money that will pour in upon him. Take 
 the other lie. ^' It is a well-known fact " that 
 in countries where every man, woman and child 
 use wine at their meals, drunkenness (so far 
 from being almost unknown) has increased 
 within the last two prosperous generations to 
 such an extent that it has become (as in France) 
 not only a national problem, but a matter of 
 life and death. That is the precise fact; de- 
 nial can come only from ignorance or greed. 
 And knowing what you know of the unfail- 
 ing progressive action of alcoholic poisoning, 
 whether the doses be minutely small or brandy- 
 large, it would be interesting to hear your opin- 
 ion of this man who would fain breed a 
 drunken race by poisoning it (with deftly wa- 
 tered doses) in the cradle. I know what I 
 think of him. I know what I would do to 
 him, if I came upon him " adding a little 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 83 
 
 wine to the glass of water for the children " — 
 by the grace of my football days, I know what 
 I would do to that smug baby-poisoner! 
 Verily. 
 
 But how's he to sell his wine — turn horrid 
 sheep-pastures into delectable vineyards — un- 
 less he breeds the wine-want in the coming 
 generation? The wise old trader! He knows, 
 none better, that the alcoholized race dies fast 
 — thirteen years too fast, even for the moderate 
 wine-drinker; and with thrifty foresight he 
 would breed a race that took to alcohol from 
 the cradle. There has been a hideous waste; 
 babies have played, sober, in the nursery; chil- 
 dren have gone, sober, to school — years of 
 juvenile sobriety that have brought not a penny 
 to this viticulturist. Heaven help his purse! 
 Wasted years! Now millions of gallons of his 
 ^' fine wine per annum " can be delicately in- 
 jected into the youth of the land, if only gen- 
 erous parents will " educate them to use wine 
 at their meals." Well, that is one way of mak- 
 ing money; possibly it seems to you the dirtiest 
 w^ay a man ever befouled himself in. 
 
 All the fashionable lies about wine are in 
 that statement save one. The viticulturist for- 
 
84 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 got to urge that wine, '^ moderately taken," 
 brightens a man up. 
 
 Does it? You have seen that the effect of 
 alcohol is merely that of loosening self-control 
 and unbuttoning the discriminating judgment, 
 so that imagination may run more lightly aber- 
 rant; thus the man is the freer for it — at a 
 certain stage the mind soars, but it soars into 
 the clouds. It is a question whether he is the 
 better for the liberation of the lower, emotional 
 nature — with bit out and bridle off; whether 
 paucum vini acuit ingenium. 
 
 Anyway, that kind of man is not worth 
 brightening; he has too shockingly low a flash- 
 point. He were best left dark. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Every kind of alcoholic beverage has its own 
 peculiar method of acting upon the nervous 
 system and the brain. Wine is the blithest and 
 headiest excitement. Beer does not make for 
 gayety, though it begets a loosening and en- 
 larging kind of physical cheerfulness. It swells 
 and sways and rumbles pleasurably in the 
 Stomachic cavity. It does not quicken the 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 85 
 
 brain and unfrock the imagination, as wine 
 does. It teases more persistently the nerves, 
 so that your beer-drinker is always touchy, quer- 
 ulous and hysterical, until he has flooded his 
 stomach. 
 
 One of the fundamental errors is that beer 
 makes for stolidity. 
 
 It is a fashion to speak of the stolid German, 
 as though he were braced and made steady by 
 his beer. There is no truth in it. He is un- 
 braced and made first dull and then hysterical. 
 If you have spent your nights in the great beer- 
 halls of Munich, for example, you have ob- 
 served that there comes an hour when one-half 
 the beer-soaked populace is beating the tables 
 in beer-anger, while the other half is in vary- 
 ing stages of beer-boorishness, beer-melancholia, 
 beer-lunacy. These are all emotional stages. 
 They are unfailingly found in the beer-drinker. 
 The symptoms are always broadly the same: 
 dullness, diminution of the power of effort 
 and the inability properly to associate ideas 
 and use them with reference to the outside 
 world. Beer disorders the middle functional 
 level of the brain. And the beer-drinker's gay- 
 ety is hysterical, just as, when he sinks into 
 
86 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 dullness, his dullness is one of rugged quies- 
 cence. Stir up a soddenly brooding beer- 
 drinker and he explodes into lawless hysteria. 
 This is a characteristic of, for example, the 
 beer-drinking German race — a sane discussion 
 with a beer-distorted German is quite impos- 
 sible. His brain is not functioning on its high- 
 est level; over that level an alcohol cloud lies 
 thick; he is functioning on the emotional plane 
 — a plane broken, dislocated and fissured by 
 off-repeated small doses of alcohol. And so, 
 argument, for him, is a mere series of emo- 
 tional explosions. You cannot argue with such 
 an one, whether he is exploding on the lecture 
 platform or in a student's club. 
 
 There is one rather attractive point at which 
 the beer-drinker poses lightly as he goes up 
 and down the ladder of his emotional excite- 
 ment. It is when he is midway between tears 
 and laughter; when the bodily glow and sense 
 of fullness are at their medium point; when 
 the bodily organs, hopefully dilated, telegraph 
 their " organic congratulations " of well-being 
 to the flushed brain; then, for a space, he loves 
 all the world, because only pleasant impressions 
 from without come to him — and he sings. Son 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 87 
 
 of the land of song! He sings of love and 
 friendship. Harmless visions of girls and 
 children haunt him. Until the emotionalism, 
 which has found expression in simple, sweet- 
 bodied lieder, drops and coarsens and he roars 
 aloud, with his chorusing fellows, for the sheer 
 joy of noise — as madmen shout. But the 
 medium point, where the beer-drinker is sen- 
 timental, musical, forthgoing, is the best that 
 beer can give. It is not to be left out of the 
 reckoning. The whisky-drinker has his mo- 
 ment of similar kindliness; but it is of shorter 
 duration. That of the beer-drinker is more 
 slowly reached and lingers on with him in 
 more leisurely enjoyment; but the states differ 
 not at all. One is due to the fifty per cent, of 
 alcohol gulped in a glass of whisky; the other 
 to the three or five per cent, of alcohol sopped 
 up in half a score of beer mugs. 
 
 Old-fashioned medical practitioners — I have 
 in mind one particular old-school doctor, ad- 
 dressing the annual convention of the Brewers' 
 Association — still sing the praises of beer. Of 
 course, Dr. belongs to a genera- 
 tion other than ours. How far it is behind 
 the scientific thought of the day you may see 
 
88 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 from the fact that it still clings pathetically 
 to " Anstie's limit " — a standard long since 
 abolished even by the Medico-Actuarial men. 
 
 And Dr. , with the wistful, unteach- 
 
 able dogmatism of age, told his brewers that 
 beer was a food as well as a drink; that 
 alcohol '^ in moderation" was a good thing; 
 that ^^ it may be taken in moderation through- 
 out life not only without injury, but under 
 certain circumstances with positive benefit, 
 and so long as the quantity does not exceed the 
 equivalent of one and a half or two ounces 
 of absolute alcohol, it is innocuous." 
 
 Anstie's limit, you see. Sharpens limit; and 
 the like. Precisely what this two-ounce quan- 
 tity of alcohol does to a man you already know. 
 It produces alcoholic paralysis on the higher 
 levels of the brain, exactly as it makes for 
 alcoholic dissolution. That old lie of the 
 " harmlessness " of two-ounce intoxication — 
 which the old-fashioned medical men parade 
 for the brewers and which the brewers parade 
 in the press — needs no refutation to-day. Sci- 
 ence has killed it; and the Medico-Actuarial 
 man has stamped upon its grave. A younger 
 physician — a modern authority — Dr. Woods 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 89 
 
 Hutchinson, dismisses it as '' incredible." In- 
 deed it is well-nigh incredible that it was ever 
 accepted by studious, unprejudiced, scientific 
 observers. 
 
 And you notice that the ^^ beer-is-food " lie 
 still sticks up its head at the annual conven- 
 tion of the brewers. 
 
 Here (for the sake of the man behind the 
 words) I shall quote Dr. Woods Hutchin- 
 son: 
 
 " The myth of its food-value as fuel to the 
 body-engine was, of course, exploded long ago, 
 but the idea still persisted, and persists that it 
 in some mysterious way increases working 
 power. 
 
 '^ The first ' teetotalers ' who declared they 
 could do their work just as well and even 
 better without it were greeted with jeers and 
 derision as deluded fanatics. 
 
 " But the number of these ^ milksops ' kept 
 steadily increasing, and finally, some five or six 
 years ago, experts decided to give the ques- 
 tion a thorough laboratory test and tryout. 
 
 " Groups of workers were selected from va- 
 rious industries whose tasks were piecework or 
 whose output could be accurately measured. 
 
90 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 The test was confined to moderate drinkers, 
 habitual drunkards or heavy imbibers who were 
 obviously the worse for liquor being eliminated. 
 
 '' The work done by the men — for instance, 
 the number of ems set by printers — on their 
 usual allowance of beer or wine was first care- 
 fully measured for three days. Then the men 
 were induced to cut out liquor in all forms for 
 three days, and when thus fairly settled on the 
 water wagon their output was again measured. 
 
 ^' Then they were allowed to resume their 
 usual rations of beer and their work again 
 measured. Many of the men complained of 
 this enforced ' fast ' and ' felt much better ' 
 when they got back to their regular beer, but 
 the actual results in cold figures were aston- 
 ishingly uniform in all ten of the trade and 
 occupation groups tested. The men during the 
 days of abstinence turned out from ten to 
 twenty-five per cent, more work than they had 
 been averaging before, and as soon as they 
 got back to their liquor and ' felt so much bet- 
 ter ' their output fell right back to the old 
 level." 
 
 The tests to which Dr. Woods Hutchin- 
 son refers were made in Munich, by Dr. Emil 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 91 
 
 Kraepelin, professor of mental diseases in 
 the university of that city. A full report of 
 the tests lies before me. Their interest to this 
 chapter lies in the fact that the tests were made 
 in a beer-land upon beer-drinkers. What they 
 demonstrated was that alcohol, taken as you 
 will, is not a stimulant; that it is first and 
 last a narcotic; that the stimulation is purely 
 imaginary — that one does less and poorer work 
 under its influence, although curiously enough 
 he thinks he is turning out more and better, 
 work. Moreover, Kraepelin and his co- 
 workers proved that the narcosis is progres- 
 sive, that it is not the fourth or fifth drink 
 that intoxicates — it is the sum of the first, sec- 
 ond and third. 
 
 A man is " drunk, or under the influence of 
 liquor to a demonstrable degree," says Doctor 
 Kraepelin, " when his muscular or mental speed 
 or endurance limits have suffered a diminution 
 as a result of his having imbibed. This con- 
 dition may be clearly shown by mechanical 
 devices of the laboratory, whose testimony is 
 final, no matter what the man himself has to 
 say about it. There is no appeal from their 
 decision." 
 
92 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 You cannot fool, for instance, the ergograph, 
 a laboratory device invented by Professor 
 Angelo Mosso; it records the muscular devia- 
 tions of the beer-drinker after one glass, two, 
 three and so on. The Munich tests spoke ir- 
 refutably. The demonstration was convincing; 
 it proved conclusively that the beer-drinker is 
 living only a small part of his normal life. His 
 beer is not a food — not a stimulant; it is de- 
 grading his powers, not increasing them. It is 
 doing to him exactly what alcohol in any and 
 every form is doing to man — poisoning him 
 from the top downwards. 
 
 ly 
 
 And cider? 
 
 This hard and dirty little brother of the 
 family? 
 
 I know best two cider-drunken lands, Nor- 
 mandy and those bleak New England hills, 
 whereof I have written. In Normandy the 
 peasant may make and drink all the cider he 
 pleases, without the excise laying hand upon 
 him. Cider he may not sell. Often I have 
 come, of a sun-hot day, into a Normandy cot- 
 
WINE, BEER AND LITTLE BROTHER 93 
 
 tage, where a peasant sat swigging his hard, 
 yellow cider — and he dared not pass me the 
 glass, though his avaricious eyes danced at sight 
 of the coin. 
 
 It is a bad drink, hard cider. It does not 
 broaden a man out as beer does, or set him 
 dancing-gay like wine. It hardens him and 
 corrodes. In the end it makes for the madness, 
 so common in the cider-countries, of melan- 
 cholia, which is a darker, down-going madness ; 
 but before that end it acts curiously on the man. 
 It begets none of the wine-y and beery " gen- 
 erosity " — the carelessness of possessing — of 
 which I have written; it breeds, rather, a curi- 
 ous, ingrowing selfishness. It is the father of 
 avarice. They are tight folk, in a twin sense of 
 the word, these cider-drinkers. And it is the 
 ^^ father of livor," as the Latin poet said; for 
 this form of alcoholic poisoning produces a 
 harsh and crabbed kind of envy — they are an 
 envious, hard, ill-contented lot, and avaricious. 
 
 These are the psychological effects of taking 
 one's alcohol in the form of cider; and the 
 drink makes for the nastiest kind of physical 
 drunkenness. It is worse than wine, it is more 
 fatally active than beer — it is, in a word or two, 
 
94 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 the worst of the three brothers. Men may drink 
 wine to be gay and beer to be emotionally 
 loosened; but he who drinks hard cider drinks 
 it for the one compelling reason that he would 
 fain be sourly drunk. 
 
 On that dirty little rustic brother of the 
 ^^ mild drink " family the law should lay a 
 heavy hand. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 ADULTERATION AND 
 FALSIFICATION 
 
 We have been told often enough by the 
 " viticulturists " that the wine-makers are 
 moved by the most philanthropical motives; 
 it is to save the race from drunkenness that 
 they want to be permitted to dose the baby 
 and the child with " wine and water." And 
 the advertisements of the beer-brewers will 
 tell you what rare philanthropists they 
 are — providing beer as '^ a food " for the 
 poor man who has no mutton twirling at his 
 fire. 
 
 Thereupon the question emerges: 
 
 If wine be so good a thing — if pure beer 
 be so beneficent a food — ^why, in the name 
 of philanthropy, do they not sell pure wine 
 and pure beer? 
 
 Here I shall ask a question — calmly, with- 
 
 95 
 
96 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 out emphasis, tranquilly, as a teacher to a stu- 
 dent in rectilinear geometry: 
 
 Were a monument erected to every distiller 
 in the United States who sells unadulterated 
 whisky — to every brewer who sells a bottle 
 of pure beer — to every wine-dealer who sells 
 unfalsified wine — how many such monuments 
 would be erected? 
 
 Injurious as pure beer is, the beer-drinker 
 does not get it; dangerous as wine is, it is not 
 wine the wine-tippler buys; and fatally poi- 
 sonous as unadulterated whisky is, the whisky- 
 drinker is poisoning himself with a deadlier 
 compound. 
 
 All hard liquors (except rum) are virtually 
 colorless; they are colored and flavored to suit 
 the taste. In all of these liquors there are 
 two kinds of impurities. Among the natural 
 impurities in whisky, for example, the only 
 one which is really harmful is fusel oil. This 
 can be eliminated, but it is almost always, 
 if not always, merely hidden. The artificial 
 impurities are legion. The distillers can add 
 chemicals which can give the whisky any 
 desired ^' age " — so far as the palate can tell. 
 Take so-called Scotch whisky. The creosote 
 
ADULTERATION — FALSIFICATION 97 
 
 in it is carried over from the peat, in the 
 natural Scottish way of making it. In the 
 '' Scotch whisky " sold in huge, unimported 
 quantities in the United States, the creosote has 
 beeo artificially added. (What creosote does 
 to the bodily organs you may gather from the 
 knowledge that it is used to preserve ham — 
 giving it the smoky odor ham-eaters admire.) 
 Most of the ^' Scotch whisky " sold in America 
 is a " fake " — a chemical decoction of various 
 poisons added to the primitive poison of alco- 
 hol. An authority (whom I am quoting 
 largely in this chapter) assured me that the 
 amount of real Scotch whisky imported into 
 this country would not supply even the bars 
 of New York City. Nine-tenths and more 
 of what is dispensed under that name is " fake " 
 — alcohol colored and flavored with cheap coal- 
 tar products and glycerine, or cheaper glucose 
 substitutes, to give it ^^ body." 
 
 Bear in mind also that even the unadul- 
 terated whisky — and a little is to be had — 
 contains usually the natural impurities, such 
 as fusel oil and creosote; for, although they 
 can be eliminated in the process of manufac- 
 ture, it is cheaper to let the poison impuri- 
 
98 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 ties remain. Against these the palate can 
 protect you, but it cannot protect you against 
 the artificial impurities and adulterations. You 
 may think you are taking one poison — the alco- 
 hol you are accustomed to take; with it you 
 are taking whatsoever poisons the conscience- 
 less, greed-bitten adulterator wills you shall 
 take. His dirtiest dishonesty leads him to use, 
 as a basis for his liquor, wood-alcohol, a 
 deadly poison, and to impose upon the palate 
 by various flavors and dyes. 
 
 At an investigation held recently at Albany, 
 by the state authorities of New York, a chem- 
 ist (a great man — I know him; he is my 
 friend) showed the commission the " tricks of 
 the trade." The distillers and their experts 
 and tasters and lobbyists were sent into an 
 outer room. Then the chemist filled a score 
 of glasses with wood-alcohol. (The commis- 
 sioners looked on.) In each glass he dropped 
 different chemicals, making for color and odor 
 and flavor. The expert whisky-men were 
 called in. Their tasters took up the glasses, 
 one after the other; and they said: ^' This is 
 gin — this is Holland — this is rye whisky, three 
 years old — this is new Bourbon whisky — this 
 
ADULTERATION — FALSIFICATION 99 
 
 is rum — this is brandy, five years in the cask 
 — this is Scotch or Irish " — and so on. 
 
 Each of the liquors was wood-alcohol, fla- 
 vored and '^ faked " — wood-alcohol, the dead- 
 liest poison that can be sent against the bodily 
 tissues. 
 
 And said the chemist: ^^ An overwhelming 
 per cent, of the liquors sold in the United 
 States are made just that way." 
 
 Poison added to poison; and the drinker is 
 given his alcohol with fierce, degrading, tissue- 
 destroying poisons on the side! 
 
 Come, fill up the cup and fill up the can 
 and toast the merry distiller! 
 
 II 
 
 The wine-^' fakers " are no whit behind the 
 distillers of strong liquors. It is well-nigh 
 impossible to purchase pure wine. And there 
 is a profligate outpouring of " wine " that 
 has never seen a grape or a grape-skin — made 
 entirely out of chemicals. 
 
 I know a wine-forger who — among his 
 friends — makes no secret of his business. 
 " Give me good water," he used to say, " and 
 
lOo DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 I will turn you out a bottle of any kind of wine 
 you like to name — while you wait." 
 
 A dispensing chemist could not make up 
 prescriptions more quickly than he manufac- 
 tures his " wines." With a gill of cheap Cali- 
 fornia wine, water, a few drops of vinegar 
 and twenty-five per cent, of potato-alcohol, 
 he will make you a quart of '' claret " while 
 you stand at his elbow. If you want a hock or 
 Sauterne, he takes a little real sherry as a 
 base, adds a little citric acidity, an astringent, 
 like tannic acid, to dry it, spirit and water in 
 proportion; and there you are. Substitute 
 white sugar syrup for the tannic acid and you 
 have a '' Chablis," and to '' age " it add a 
 little glycerine or glucose. 
 
 What'll you have? 
 
 Here's a brandy made of silent spirit and 
 oenanthic ether, colored and sweetened with 
 caramel — wood-alcohol as a basis. An old dry 
 champagne? Chemicals with a little aerated 
 water added to the potato spirit. 
 
 And what will you top off with? 
 
 Your forger ranges his bottles of benzoic 
 acid, benzoic ether, acetic acid and ether, 
 oenanthic ether and glycerine or glucose; a 
 
ADULTERATION — FALSIFICATION loi 
 
 drop or two of each — then fills up the glass 
 with wood or potato alcohol and, lo, it is 
 Maraschino! Do you prefer Kirchwasser? A 
 drop or two of cochineal will " do the trick." 
 
 Liqueurs and wines; nine times out of ten, 
 in this country, you are drinking the product 
 of the forger — a product that has never seen 
 grape-skin or grape. 
 
 But the Americans are not (despite the ef- 
 forts of the cheery California viticulturist) a 
 wine-drinking race. It is chiefly for the snob 
 that the wine-forger forges. Nor is the wine- 
 propaganda so loud and noisy as that made by 
 the brewers and dispensers of beer. Turn, 
 then, to beer. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Can you buy a glass of pure beer, made of 
 malt and hops, in the United States? 
 
 I doubt it — since a little old man, a beer 
 enthusiast, died over on Staten Island a little 
 while ago. He was of German extraction, 
 having been painlessly extracted from Ger- 
 many in his earliest youth. He came to Staten 
 Island long ago. In the little garden behind 
 his house he set up a domestic brewery; and 
 
102 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 there — in this age of adulteration! — he brewed 
 a real beer. But he is dead, the little man, 
 and he left no son. 
 
 I say it is doubtful if you can buy a glass 
 of pure beer in any American " saloon " — or 
 drink it at any brewery. 
 
 There are nineteen hop-substitutes; there are 
 fifteen malt-substitutes; so the brewer has his 
 choice. And what does he not choose? Aloes 
 to give a bitter taste, soapstone for frothiness, 
 catechu for astringency. 
 
 There is one infallible test for honest beer — 
 stand a bottle of it in the sun! What this test 
 means I shall make clear in a moment. 
 
 A few years ago the advocates of pure food 
 — and drink — tried to get through the legis- 
 lature at Albany a law compelling the brewers 
 to hold their beer in lager for three months. 
 What happened? The brewers rose, screaming 
 with beer-hysteria; armed with clubs and finan- 
 cial sandbags they slew the bill. Why? What 
 was their objection to the measure? In 
 France, in England, in Germany, beer must (so 
 runs the law) be lagered — that is, it must be 
 stored for three months. There is no objec- 
 tion to the law there, because the brewers are 
 
ADULTERATION — FALSIFICATION 103 
 
 occupied in the relatively honest business of 
 making beer out of malt and hops. In this 
 country — in the ordinarily careless way in 
 which they are permitted to make beer, with- 
 out any supervision or standard — in this coun- 
 try, I repeat, the ferment the brewers use 
 is accompanied by a large amount of other 
 bacteria, which set up putrefactive fermenta- 
 tions in the organic matter accompanying the 
 starches — and even in the starches themselves. 
 Do you see the point? The ferment is not 
 inspected and it is always — not occasionally — 
 impure. As a result the beer ferments putre- 
 factively. These putrefactive changes go 
 steadily on. In order to overcome them, the 
 brewers add what they are pleased to call 
 ^^ preservatives." These '' preservatives " range 
 all the way from arsenious acid, or what is 
 known as white arsenic (a deadly poison), to 
 salicylic acid, which causes many pathological 
 injuries when used over a period of time — 
 attacking notably the kidneys and irritating the 
 liver. 
 
 The " preservatives " are poisons and they 
 are in all American beer — not to mention the 
 large number of substances added for pur- 
 
104 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 poses of taste-deception, such as those em- 
 ployed to give " body," '' grip,'' the after-taste 
 and so on. 
 
 Now pure beer could be kept indefinitely. 
 
 It could be kept even in the sun. 
 
 Whereas if a bottle of impure beer — or 
 American beer with its ^' preservatives " — ^were 
 left in the sunlight for a few days, it would 
 explode into rottenness. 
 
 A fact, a dire fact. 
 
 The proposed law, enacting that beer should 
 be kept in lager for six months, would have 
 put every brewery out of business — and the 
 beer they make, kept thus in lager, would have 
 ended in an explosion of rottenness. It could 
 not be kept for three months — or two. That 
 law would have forced them to brew honest 
 beer. 
 
 One of the authorities called in by those be- 
 hind the bill stated that a hundred per cent, 
 of the beer brewed in the United States was 
 bad. Do you want to test the thing? Buy a 
 bottle of beer and stand it in the sun. You 
 do not need to take the brewer's word for it. 
 Put it to the test — and sunlight, that ancient 
 chemist, stands ready at your call, to make the 
 
ADULTERATION — FALSIFICATION 105 
 
 test and pronounce the infallible judgment. 
 The bacteria that set up the putrefactive fer- 
 mentations, working busily in the sunlight, will 
 rot it before your eyes — till the putrefied mass 
 explodes. 
 
 There is an advertisement which is appear- 
 ing in newspapers all over the country: 
 
 ^' Light Bottle Brewers Guilty 
 
 '' They confess publicly the crying need for 
 protecting their beer from light — they admit 
 that the instant the case is uncovered, danger 
 from light begins — causing a chemical change 
 resulting in decay, and rendering it unfit to 
 take into the stomach." 
 
 The brewer behind that advertisement states 
 that the remedy is to sell beer in brown bottles! 
 It is one solution of the problem. Another 
 solution would seem to be a law forbidding 
 the use of " preservatives " in beer and mak- 
 ing the ^' lagering " of beer compulsory — so it 
 may rot, if it be impure, in the cellars of the 
 brewer and not in the intestines of the citizen. 
 
 My authority tells me imported beer is well- 
 nigh as bad, because, when beer in England, 
 France, Germany, Austria is condemned as bad, 
 
io6 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 those governments still permit it to be ex- 
 ported. And we get it — as this country is the 
 chief one which has no inspection. 
 
 A law decreeing that beer must be stored 
 a definite period would do much to halt the 
 beer-adulterators. Were they compelled to 
 lager it for six months, the stuff they make 
 would — at the end of that time — be a stinking 
 mess, unsalable. With the exception of the 
 arsenic and one or two other of the " pre- 
 servatives " they make use of, all undergo a 
 process of disintegration and last — as a rule — 
 only two or three months. 
 
 Beers and ales alike; you have but to let 
 the sunlight at them to discover that they are 
 foul, putrescent messes — their so-called " pre- 
 servatives " a poison-lie. 
 
 What even good beer does to a man you 
 know; what the beer the unguarded Ameri- 
 can is forced and coaxed into drinking does 
 to him is a matter for the pathologist and 
 (I should like to think the law will make it 
 so) for the penologist. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WHY SOME DRINKERS ARE 
 DRUNKARDS 
 
 There are two kinds of drunkards. 
 
 The one with whom I am immediately con- 
 cerned is described, with scientific exactitude 
 of phrase, in the words: "a dissolute man." 
 He is one whose moral character is being dis- 
 integrated. 
 
 I need lay no further stress upon the signs 
 and phenomena of intoxication. The thought 
 you are to take with you is that they are 
 accompanied with coincident physical changes. 
 In other words, the vice, as it progresses, 
 trails with it corresponding diseases of the 
 body. The origin — the cause — of these physi- 
 cal degenerations is twofold. In the first place, 
 there are the well-defined effects produced by 
 the direct action of alcohol on nerve-tissue, 
 
 and by the impoverished quality of the blood- 
 
 107 
 
io8 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 supply. Your physician — if he be not that 
 dear, old-fashioned port-wine-y person for 
 whom alcohol is still '' a food " — will tell you 
 what this means. Roughly, it means a degen- 
 erative breaking down of the nerve-elements, 
 thickening and inelasticity of the blood-vessels, 
 and an overgrowth of the tissue-elements which 
 normally serve as a mere groundwork in which 
 the nerve-elements are imbedded. (I have 
 used almost the exact words of the distin- 
 guished Scottish physiologist. Dr. George R. 
 Wilson.) This is the first causal factor; the 
 second has an importance of its own — it is, 
 indeed, the causa causans of drunkenness. And 
 here I shall ask you to bear in mind the state- 
 ment, already made, that good conduct, like 
 every other mental habit, has an organic basis. 
 It has a definite mechanism of nerve-cells and 
 fibers. And — since the higher morality in man 
 is a late acquisition — the mechanism is recent, 
 unstable and early injured. (Brain trouble is 
 always first indicated by moral lapses.) 
 
 Now, of your two drunkards, one is morally 
 defective from the start — a moral imbecile of 
 a sort; that was the cause of his taking to drink. 
 The other drunkard had to set up a patho- 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 109 
 
 logical process which would bring him to the 
 same state of moral imbecility. The one was 
 born to his drunken inheritance, the other pre- 
 pared himself for it. The one was diseased 
 at the start; the other took his self-appointed 
 way, through vice, to the identical degenerative 
 condition of disease. What that degeneration 
 is should get itself proclaimed here, with clar- 
 ity and emphasis; therefore, I shall make use 
 of Dr. Maudsley's authoritative words: 
 
 " Good moral feeling is to be looked upon 
 as an essential part of a sound and rightly 
 developed character in the present state of 
 human evolution in civilized lands. Its ac- 
 quisition is the condition of development in 
 the process of humanization. Whosoever is 
 destitute of it is to that extent a defective 
 being; he marks the beginning of race- 
 degeneracy; and, if propitious influences do 
 not chance to check or to neutralize the morbid 
 tendency, his children will be actual morbid 
 varieties. Whether the particular outcome of 
 the morbid strain shall be vice or madness or 
 crime will depend much on the circumstances 
 of life; but there is no doubt in my mind that 
 one way in which insanity is generated de 
 
no DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 novo is through the deterioration of nature 
 which is shown in the absence of moral sense. 
 It was the last acquisition in the progress of 
 humanization, and its decay is the first sign 
 of human degeneracy." 
 
 What is the first sign of chronic alcoholism? 
 
 Deterioration in character. 
 
 And, with the drunkard's vices and defects 
 in intelligence, his physical degenerations 
 make equal and coincident progress. They 
 go together; but moral degradation has the 
 pas. 
 
 You have noticed how drunkards come to- 
 gether, irrespective of cast and class conditions. 
 It is because all drunkards are alike. They 
 are members of a dreadful freemasonry. 
 When you have pictured one you have pic- 
 tured all; for the merry drunkard is merely 
 at a different stage from the lachrymose drunk- 
 ard — the brawler is a drunkard at a different 
 etape from the amorous drunkard; that is all. 
 It is the same man, going through the '' seven 
 stages " of drink — through elation, and depres- 
 sion, through irritability to mellowness, or to 
 the tearful stage of collapse and incapacity; 
 the last stage of all is the sort of death you 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS iii 
 
 know. Fictionists and dramatists like to pic- 
 ture him at the mellow stage, but that is de- 
 ceptive. The truth is the drunkard goes 
 through every one of the stages in his drunken 
 day; and your moderate drinker (a thing to be 
 noted) does precisely the same thing in a 
 fainter, less emphatic manner. Thus degen- 
 erating atop, every man who poisons himself 
 regularly with alcohol is petulant and morose, 
 selfish from organic ill-being, talkative and a 
 liar — 
 
 (An axiom: Every drunkard is a liar and 
 usually a bad liar; even your moderate drinker 
 is fatally doomed to inexactitude of statement. 
 He can, thank Heaven! drink and be sober; 
 but less and less is it possible for him to drink 
 and state a precise, unshaded truth.) 
 
 He is a liar; he began, it may be, in gay 
 and imaginative distortion of facts; then he 
 built his lies for self-protection— the lie of 
 the ''sick friend" and the like; but inevitably 
 he went easily to cruel and needless lying; he 
 lied for the lie's sake, because his whole habit 
 of mind — the standard of right conduct being 
 destroyed — was toward dishonesty. And he 
 knows he is a liar; knowing which he has no 
 
112 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 faith in any man — and he winks his skepticism, 
 when he hears mention of the common hon- 
 esties of life. Always there is the arrogant 
 glorification of self and the sneering vilifica- 
 tion of others. He can't see above his own 
 low level. And he goes his way to the one 
 vice which usually, in modest-spoken society, 
 stands for all the others. It is not my business 
 to discuss sexuality in this book; but the so- 
 cial evil is so kneaded into the alcohol evil — 
 in a oneness of vice — that they cannot be dis- 
 sociated. Drunkards and prostitutes fall to- 
 gether like a shock of oats. Drink and un- 
 chastity are unholy, inseparable twins. 
 
 Before I sat down to write these pages to- 
 day, I looked over the morning newspaper; 
 and in the autobiographical article of '^ Jess " 
 Willard, the prize-fighter (and there is a clean- 
 minded, right-thinking man for you — a man 
 sane from the top downwards!), I read these 
 words : 
 
 "Vice and drunkenness! The two always 
 go together, and wherever they go you'll find 
 sickness and disease and misery. 
 
 '' All this may sound funny from a prize- 
 fighter. But just remember I was a husband 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 113 
 
 and a father before I entered the ring. And, 
 because I am champion, I figure that maybe 
 boys will listen to me when they would give 
 anybody else the laugh as a ' sissy.' 
 
 " You can't be strong and well unless you 
 live right. When you go up against nature you 
 get the worst of it every time. And nature 
 doesn't stand for whisky and lust." 
 
 " The word of a sane-minded, sane-bodied 
 man," said I; and I turned the page. What I 
 found was a report of the annual meeting of 
 the International Congress of Viticulture, held 
 at the '^ Old Faithful Inn " in San Francisco. 
 
 Just as the brewers paraded Dr. 
 
 at their annual convention, the viti- 
 
 culturists paraded what notable apologist for 
 wine they could capture. They captured a 
 woman. I shall not write her name here, 
 though the newspapers display it in big type. 
 She is described as a famous woman, old and 
 vehement, " the mother of suffrage in the state 
 of Oregon." And, with this, I shall quote 
 what she is reported to have said about 
 her sister-suffragists who are working for 
 prohibition in the United States; the report 
 reads: 
 
114 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 " ' Pussy-wussy/ ^ white-ribboned sisters of 
 virtue ' were some of the epithets applied to 
 these agitators by Mrs. ." 
 
 I was going to quote her speech in favor 
 of drink, at the conclusion of which '' the entire 
 assembly rose to its feet and drank a toast to 
 her," but why should I quote the wine-y com- 
 monplaces you have so often heard roared in 
 song? Let it be as it is. But I would ask 
 you to compare these unwomanly sneers of 
 " pussy-wussy " and " white-ribboned sisters of 
 virtue" — think! a woman sneers at her sisters 
 of virtue — compare them, I say, with the frank 
 and beautiful moral courage of the prize- 
 fighter. 
 
 I know whose hand I had rather take in 
 mine. I know in whose house I would more 
 proudly sit at table. And I know that drink — 
 the perfumed alcohol of wine like the rest of 
 it — begins its work of moral degeneration at 
 the top. That scene at the convention of 
 '^ viticulturists " is proof sufficient. And you 
 may have your own opinion of those who set 
 the poor old '^ mother of suffrage " to plead 
 their poisonous cause. (How did the words 
 run? "Add a little wine to the glass of water 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 115 
 
 for the children " — breed your drunkards in 
 the cradle.) 
 
 And so no more of the subject. All I had 
 to say of that unchaste twin of drink, the prize- 
 fighter has said in his rough, honest man's voice 
 — unafraid of being laughed at as a '' sissy " 
 or a " pussy-wussy," unafraid of the sneers of 
 man or woman at his '' white-ribboned virtue." 
 His words are those of a noble and brave man. 
 It is pathetic that the sneer came from a 
 woman. 
 
 II 
 
 All drinking men and women are broadly 
 alike, when you take them at an equal point 
 in their journey toward alcoholic dissolution. 
 Of course their emotional vagaries differ. The 
 way of life, the mental habit, make for various 
 exhibitions of unchecked emotion. Just how 
 the aberrancy — moral and mental — will express 
 itself depends upon education, environment, 
 predisposition. In one alcohol demands emo- 
 tional expression — and he writes verse. In an- 
 other a dark, brooding sense of religion is born, 
 and, like Kit Smart, he prays aloud in the 
 Street. In a third the two impulses may be 
 
ii6 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 combined, and you have Paul Verlaine's wild 
 passion of poetry and prayer. (Days of youth 
 r — and the dark tavern of Francis the First, 
 and Verlaine, over his tenth glass of rum-and- 
 water staring into the abyss of his life; and 
 shrieking! Helas, pauvre Lelianf) 
 
 Wantonness or hilarity, shuddering gloom or 
 bland, mindless optimism, are foreshadowings 
 of the same pathological condition. Self- 
 control is weakened and judgment is gone; and 
 what each drunkard exhibits is himself — his 
 characteristic emotions — but he differs from 
 his brother-drinkers only in the color of his 
 coat. It is the same degeneration, variously 
 expressed. 
 
 Two kinds of drunkards. 
 
 In one drunkenness is a neurosis — a dark 
 brother of epilepsy and insanity. 
 
 In the other it may be no more than vice — 
 a failure to live up to the ethical standard his 
 generation, at its point of evolution, has fixed. 
 
 Both, victims of alcohol, are going the same 
 road of moral insanity and mental death. It 
 is Nature's protest against the poison-violence 
 that has been done her; it is her indefectible 
 sentence upon the criminal. Do you remem- 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 117 
 
 ber Goethe's grim statement of this natural 
 law? It is echoing in my memory as I write: 
 " Wenn die Natur verabscheut, so spricht sie 
 laut aus: das Geschopf, das falsch lebt, wird 
 friih zerstort. Unfruchtbarkeit, kiimmerliches 
 Dasein, friihzeitiges Zerfallen, das sind ihre 
 Fliiche, die Kennzeichen ihrer Strenge." Ay, 
 to the drunkard nature speaks aloud, decreeing 
 that he who lives with a false life shall be 
 soon destroyed — unfruitfulness, needy existence, 
 early destruction, these are her curses, the 
 tokens of her displeasure. 
 
 Why, then, are some drinkers drunkards? 
 
 Why not all? 
 
 Why can some men drink and be sober, at 
 least on the lower functional levels, while 
 others go swiftly toward alcoholic demen- 
 tia? 
 
 It is for the physiologist to answer these 
 questions. He will tell you that the causation 
 of drink falls apart into two divisions — the 
 organic cause and the environmental cause. In 
 plainer words, the causes of the vice are: 
 Thirst and its Opportunity. 
 
 In the United States the opportunities and 
 facilities for drinking alcohol are tolerably 
 
ii8 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 complete. The saloon and beer-hall and 
 " cafe," the country club and the road-house, 
 the cabaret and the brothel open their doors 
 at all the crossroads of life. The historic 
 association of boon-fellowship and drink; the 
 palate-cheating disguises of luxurious '' mixed 
 drinks " wherein eggs and fruits and herbs hide 
 the hard, repellent edge of alcohol; the osten- 
 tatious " have-one-on-me " habit; the dance- 
 mania — these are the more conspicuous envi- 
 ronmental causes, though you can add a dozen 
 more. 
 
 Here, then, is the opportunity. Here, then, 
 is the soil in which the rank weed may take 
 root. Every man — every child and woman — 
 is given the chance to become a drunkard. 
 And yet not all drinkers, we know, reach (ere 
 death steps in and takes them) this end and 
 climax of alcoholism. Many, some, not a few 
 can, thank Heaven! drink and be sober — rela- 
 tively. They have not the same organic bent 
 toward drunkenness; slowly, by long-continued 
 absorption of alcohol, they have to create arti- 
 ficially those subjective conditions which make 
 for drunkenness and which the readier drunk- 
 ard is born to as to a tragic inheritance. 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 119 
 
 " Every human constitution has an inborn 
 bias toward some form of ill-health." 
 
 The potentiality is there, though the malady 
 may be kept under by good habits of life; the 
 proclivity is there. This bent toward a cer- 
 tain disease is called, by medical men, the 
 diathesis. And your diathesis may be toward 
 gout or tuberculosis or any one of a hundred 
 maladies. For every human constitution there 
 is a malady which must be held at bay. The 
 alcoholic diathesis (like those of insanity and 
 epilepsy) is a predisposition to certain forms 
 of nervous disease. In other words, there is 
 a kind of brain that reacts (more readily than 
 others) to alcohol. It is more susceptible to 
 the poison, lends itself more readily to alco- 
 holic dissolution. It may be in many respects 
 a good brain. It may be the brain of Edgar 
 Allan Poe, or that of James Thomson or Paul 
 Verlaine or Alfred de Musset. (Verlaine's 
 confession you know; and Poe, in a profoundly 
 sad page, analyzed his dark neurosis — his 
 drink-storms were the explosive signals of 
 disease, not of vice.) What it lacks is sta- 
 bility — a sound co-ordination of the nervous 
 system — an equitable adjustment of the func- 
 
I20 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 tional levels. They are an excitable race, im- 
 patient of the commonness of life — its quotidian 
 regularity; they crave cerebral stimulation. 
 These men come into the w^orld apt for drunk- 
 enness. They are organized for it. Given the 
 opportunity — placed in the environment of 
 drink — their predisposition leads straight to 
 alcoholism. Where other men are drinkers, 
 they are drunkards. 
 
 Is this a hereditary curse laid upon them, 
 you ask? 
 
 Is it because his father was a drunkard that 
 he, too, is drink's victim? 
 
 By no means; drunkenness is not hereditary; 
 the reproduction of our kind is well-nigh inde- 
 pendent of our environment and it is unin- 
 fluenced by changes set up during the lifetime 
 of the individual; acquired conditions, morbid 
 or otherwise, cannot be transmitted to pos- 
 terity — modern science avers it. 
 
 But (a but of emphasis) what can be trans- 
 mitted is a peculiar nervous organization, 
 favorable to a certain diathesis — a certain 
 predisposition; and environment does the rest. 
 You cannot transmit vice — defective morals — 
 to your son; that he must acquire and must 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 121 
 
 personally answer for; what you do give 
 him is a nervous organization in which your 
 peculiar vice most readily takes root. That 
 is the real truth about heredity. You pass 
 on an unstable nervous system in which the 
 potentiality lies — whether that potentiality 
 shall be developed or checked is within the 
 will of your son. Were not the environment 
 there — had not your son to walk abroad in 
 a drink-poisoned world — that potentiality 
 would never bear its poisoned fruit of drunk- 
 enness and degeneration. His was the choice 
 whether he should be a drunkard or a free 
 man; only he had to fight a stronger tendency 
 than other men. The thing that slays him 
 is not an inborn thirst; it is the social environ- 
 ment — the smell of drink and the drunken cry 
 of boon-fellowship at all the crossroads of life 
 that pull him down. 
 
 Have I made it clear why some drinkers are 
 drunkards? Why they go swiftly to an end 
 the moderate drinker reaches more slowly — 
 though it be the same end? They are born 
 to nervous disorder; they have it thrust upon 
 them in the cradle; and that identical nervous 
 disorder (which in its last stage produces 
 
122 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 alcoholism) the moderate drinker is deter- 
 minedly, artificially, inexcusably creating for 
 himself. For the diathetic drunkard one may 
 have a kind of pity — he is the victim of a 
 civilization, boozily organized for his un- 
 doing; as for the others, whose imbecile aim 
 in life is to drink and be sober enough to 
 escape being hauled up before the " beak " 
 as " drunk and disorderly," one has only an 
 amazed sort of contempt. They are, by pro- 
 fession, an unprofitable and disreputable tribe. 
 The man who comes, a moral imbecile, into 
 a world too drink-laden for him to resist de- 
 mands a fool's pardon; but the man who sets 
 about making himself a mental imbecile — who 
 poisons himself atop, willfully and in cold, 
 unclamoring blood — is deliberately criminal. 
 My word, he's the worse of the two! Of his 
 own will, untempted and unforced, he has 
 taken to that alcoholic kind of poison, which 
 is of all poisons the most subtly dangerous. 
 
 Dangerous? It has filled more graves than 
 sword and famine and plague — more than all 
 the hostile powers of nature. 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 123 
 
 III 
 
 Women and babies 
 
 Men still alive and not incredibly old re- 
 member when the social habit of the United 
 States was tolerably sober. Notably the women 
 did not drink — nice women did not drink; 
 women of the lower, the middle and the upper 
 classes took a social pride in being sober 
 brides and sober mothers. The old eight- 
 eenth-century habit of putting the bridegroom 
 drunk to bed, which is so prominent in the 
 English fiction and memoirs of the period, 
 never obtained in this country. The early 
 Puritans, who cast the matrix of the nation, 
 were a sober lot. Indeed, the larger part 
 of them was made up of total abstainers. As 
 the villages grew into towns and cities, society 
 became more and more boozily organized. 
 Immigration furnished, also, a race of mothers 
 more definitely given to the alcohol habit than 
 v/as the native stock. The result has been 
 startling, for exactly in proportion with the 
 increase in the consumption of alcohol, has 
 been the lowering of the birth-rate. In the 
 year ending 19 14 the birth-rate in the United 
 
124 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 States diminished eleven and four-tenths per 
 cent. And there is a corollary to this grim 
 fact: in spite of fewer births — in spite of the 
 efforts of science and philanthropy to enforce 
 euthenic ways of life — there is a steady and 
 measurable increase in the tendency to alcohol- 
 ism and its accompanying racial degeneration. 
 It is the '' last word of science," according 
 to that unimpeached authority, the Lancet, that 
 " alcoholic parents are liable to have children 
 who are degenerate — ^weak in body and feeble 
 in mind, with a tendency to become paupers, 
 criminals, epileptics and drunkards." They 
 inherit a tendency toward vice — though the 
 impulse may not be especially toward the 
 drunken form of viciousness. And in this 
 weakening and degrading of the race the 
 alcoholic mother bears a heavier responsi- 
 bility than her mate. The reasons for this fact 
 go back into an embryology which there is 
 no need of discussing here. The point I 
 would make is this: abstemious motherhood 
 does much to offset the grave results brought 
 upon the children by alcoholic fatherhood. 
 For the child of a drunken father there is 
 little hope; if the mother, also, is poisoned. 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 125 
 
 more or less, with alcohol there is no hope. 
 The future of the race depends upon the 
 mothers. 
 
 A commonplace, you say? 
 
 Unquestionably; and a "commonplace" is 
 merely a recognition of one of those dominant 
 truths which need no formal demonstration. 
 This particular commonplace cannot get it- 
 self too often stated. Upon the mothers de- 
 pends the future of the race. And the mothers 
 who accustom themselves to alcoholic poison, 
 even before they are ready for their chil- 
 dren, are preparing a race, doomed — in heed- 
 less anticipation — to the madhouse, the prison, 
 or dingier and less tragic forms of social 
 failure. 
 
 If the mother drinks, even before she is 
 ready for her children, she is preparing 
 for them a physical inheritance of degen- 
 eration. Do not take it too seriously. It 
 may be, to be sure, merely a predisposition 
 to some form of degeneration. It may be so 
 slightly vicious an inheritance — especially if 
 the father be a clean man — that the child's 
 handicap is negligible to a degree in this 
 boozily organized world. But, great or small. 
 
126 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 it is there — a handicap to be weighed and 
 measured like the lead-pad on a race-horse. 
 Her drinking of alcohol does not foredoom 
 her unborn child to drunkenness; it merely 
 handicaps the child in its life-race. 
 
 It is, however, possible for a child, born 
 of parents eugenically fit, to be started on a 
 career of drunkenness in the cradle. Many 
 are so started. 
 
 These are strong words, but behind them 
 is ample authority. The physician who has 
 had much to do with the failures in life — 
 the mental and nervous wrecks, the victims 
 of drugs and drink-storms, dissolute and im- 
 moral women — always looks carefully into the 
 " early history " of his patient. It is of first 
 importance for him to learn how, as a baby, 
 the unfortunate one was nursed, fed and 
 soothed. Dr. William Lee Howard has spe- 
 cialized in the study of baby drunkards, and 
 has made an admirable statement of his in- 
 vestigations. Read here: 
 
 " Friends and relatives are frequently puz- 
 zled and shocked to find a young man of 
 excellent parentage unable to conform to the 
 conventionalities of life. He goes on sprees, 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 127 
 
 lies, is unable to hold a business or social 
 position, and, as a rule, ends his disgraceful 
 career in a sanatorium or jail. A young woman 
 whose family has been known for its moral 
 and physical balance, whose mother, grand- 
 mother, father and all her kin have been 
 of the best stock and habits, secretly takes 
 to drink. She becomes uncontrollable. Some 
 day the public is astounded by a scandal 
 — the young woman has gone wrong through 
 drink. And right here I wish to say that our 
 cursed prudery and hypocrisy have prevented 
 our girls knowing the real truth about the 
 danger of taking the smallest sort of alcoholic 
 drink. Nothing on this earth, and probably 
 nothing off it, will so quickly stimulate a 
 young woman or girl to wrong impulses, so 
 powerfully paralyze good moral instincts, as 
 alcohol. Especially true is this in the girl 
 from fourteen to twenty years old. Ninety per 
 cent, of the girls who go wrong will tell you 
 that they fell before the teasing effects of 
 drink. 
 
 ^^ In tracing the early life of most of these 
 cases of habitual drunkenness, incompetency 
 and drug habits, we find the child was, dur- 
 
128 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 ing its nursing period, kept on alcohol or 
 drugsf^ 
 
 The physician followed the career of many 
 of these cradle drunkards. Death was busy 
 with them. He noted that many deaths, attrib- 
 uted to malnutrition, to anemia, intestinal 
 troubles and convulsions, were in reality due to 
 alcoholic poisoning. The stark children, eu- 
 genically born, lived through the years of 
 baby drunkenness and they came to the " play 
 age," with its wonderful recuperative power, 
 fresh air and freedom from brain and nerve 
 worry. They could get along without the 
 stimulant. Nature supplied a better one. 
 '' But nerve- and brain-cells," I am quoting 
 Dr. Howard, ^' are not strong; they have lost 
 forever those elements which in childhood go 
 to nourish them. They can never get back 
 these destroyed vital elements. Now comes 
 the time in life when nerve balance, brain 
 power, all the God-given forces in man are 
 needed. Many of these unfortunates are am- 
 bitious, moral, determined to succeed in life's 
 struggle. They try, try. They fail, fail. It 
 is not possible for them to stand the strain — 
 the forces are not there. Then comes the cry 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 129 
 
 — that old cradle cry for relief. Alcohol gives 
 them such false power that it is tried again. 
 In the woman it is generally morphine. We 
 all know the end of these pathetic cases." 
 
 There is another and subtler way in which 
 the nursing mother may administer alcohol 
 to the child. She has but to take her '^ for- 
 tifying tonic/' her bottle of stout, her much 
 advertised '' malt liquor " and just as surely 
 the baby will take in, with each meal, a quan- 
 tity of alcohol. And your modern physician 
 (not rosy from port) asserts that the result, 
 when it comes to manhood or womanhood, is 
 just the same as is seen in the other kinds 
 of infant drunkenness. 
 
 This is a dismal picture; but it does not 
 picture the facts with perfect accuracy. There 
 is another side to the question. In fairness 
 to the ^' viticulturists " and the brewers it 
 should be stated. Precisely as one may fend 
 off smallpox by injections of a smallpox vac- 
 cine, so one may breed a race which can 
 absorb alcohol. There is no apter illustra- 
 tion than that of Mithridates, who made him- 
 self poison-proof by daily increased doses of 
 poison. Nature does not (as I have insisted) 
 
I30 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 transmit a craving for drink. Had she done 
 so the world had long ago been depopulated — 
 perishing in wild, alcoholic dissolution. What 
 Nature does, in a patient way, is to try and 
 increase the power of resisting the poison- 
 effects of alcohol. She tries to produce a 
 body upon which alcohol will act with the 
 least possible effect and the leas't possible 
 injury. Thus you get your man who is not 
 so much affected by alcohol as is your normal 
 unpoisoned man. Generation after generation 
 she goes on perfecting that kind of man, until 
 to him alcohol is not a swiftly fatal poison. 
 Her method is a singular one. Its tendency 
 is to weed out of the race the individuals 
 who find the highest pleasure in alcoholic 
 exhilaration. The survivors are those who 
 have a weak tendency to alcoholism. The sur- 
 vivors are those, who, poisoned on the higher 
 functional levels, are dulled to the keener ex- 
 citements of alcoholic stimulation. They are 
 — it is true — " vaccinated " against alcoholic 
 explosions. They have acquired a feeble but 
 persistent state of alcoholism, which insures 
 them against the more violent forms. It is 
 something of this sort you get in Southern 
 
WHY SOME ARE DRUNKARDS 131 
 
 Europe, where dwell the races which have 
 had the largest experience of alcoholic drink. 
 Alcoholic degeneration is more uniformly 
 spread over the race; it does not reach — so 
 often as in the less experienced North — such 
 high points of mania and crime. Nature there 
 has done her best to develop a kind of human 
 animal that could live and propagate in spite 
 of his indulgence in poison; and she has kept 
 the race alive. It can be done. You can 
 breed a race which, though it be not wholly 
 immune to the poison, can live. It lives, 
 though on a lower level. It lives merely by 
 the survival of those who are fittest to cope 
 with a poison that eliminates the finer and 
 more susceptible part of the race. That is 
 the Sibylline price paid. 
 
 Why are some drinkers drunkards? 
 
 The answer, as you see, is tripartite. 
 
 Your drunkard may be one who is morally 
 defective from the start — a moral imbecile. 
 Given a boozy environment and his end is 
 certain and evident as a rock. And your other 
 drunkard may have an organic weakness that 
 predisposes him to drunkenness or any other 
 form of vice which comes most readily to in- 
 
132 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 fluence him. Your third drunkard, eugenically 
 born, is the most pathetic victim — poisoned at 
 the breast, fitted for alcoholic degeneration 
 in his cradle. 
 
 And were you to ask why (conversely) some 
 drinkers are not drunkards, one finds two good 
 reasons: The first is that they die in time; 
 the second is that, by racial inheritance, they 
 can live, seemingly normal, in a subdued state 
 of alcoholic poisoning in which a clean man 
 would frightfully perish. And possibly that 
 death, for a man of moral aspiration, were 
 the cleanlier and nobler end. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THERAPEUTICS 
 
 You have seen, I think, with tolerable 
 clearness, what drink does to the man. We 
 have been considering him as an individual, 
 not as a unit in the state, with duties civic 
 and social. In a succeeding chapter I want 
 to look at him in a broader way, for his de- 
 generation is symbolic — it is the measure of 
 a nation's degeneration. For the moment the 
 question is: Has science found a cure for the 
 drink evil in the individual man? Can it cure 
 the dipsomaniac, that unhappy man who is 
 beaten upon now and then by wild, fierce and 
 fleeting drink-storms? And, of more real 
 importance to this inquiry, can it cure the 
 so-called moderate drinker — he who does not 
 seem to be abnormal — whose palsies and tox- 
 emias are safely hidden from the casual ob- 
 servation? Is there a cure for that pathetic 
 
 133 
 
134 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 optimist who can drink, he avers, and be 
 sober? 
 
 Drunkenness is more preventable than cur- 
 able. If you look back, merely for a genera- 
 tion, you will see how wide a field has been 
 left open to the quack and the adventurer. 
 Your morning newspaper brings you the ad- 
 vertisement of more than one nostrum for 
 " destroying the drink-habit." All of which 
 is tragic — like Lear's fool — in spite of its 
 buffoonery. One charlatan prints his chal- 
 lenge to cure drunkenness by hypnotism. An- 
 other — no less a charlatan, because of the fact 
 that he is consumed with spiritual zeal — as- 
 pires to pray it away, or bury it in platform 
 rhetoric. And the medical man has his sana- 
 toria. The reformers would whip it as a vice. 
 They see that one evident result of drink is 
 moral deterioration. And they would pun- 
 ish the individual for this moral lapse. (With 
 similar logic the Middle Ages lashed the 
 maniac because he showed signs of his mad- 
 ness.) The difficulty here is that the popular 
 mind has an instinctive reluctance to attribute 
 moral defects to physical causes. 
 
 And the medical men? 
 
THERAPEUTICS 135 
 
 I think the man who has made the most 
 special study of inebriety is Dr. Crothers, of 
 Hartford. In a paper which he read before 
 a recent convention of the American Medical 
 Association, he touched upon this illusion of 
 the popular mind. With a great deal of jus- 
 tice he holds that it is one of the chief ob- 
 stacles in the way of the scientific treatment 
 of alcoholism and inebriety. Here is his 
 argument: 
 
 '^ The so-called moderate drinker is always 
 more or less a paretic and toxemic, with de- 
 generations and depressions of every organ of 
 the body. The premonitory symptoms may 
 be localized in deranged metabolism, circula- 
 tion and psychic capacity. 
 
 ^' Laboratory studies show that the continued 
 use of spirits, even in small doses, is anesthetic, 
 corrosive and cumulative; that toxins from 
 without and within are constantly present and 
 being formed. Bacterial infections and in- 
 flammatory conditions always follow in va- 
 rious degrees. The premonitory symptoms are 
 so general and are often so masked as to be 
 overlooked. 
 
 " The common congested face, furtive eye 
 
136 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 and diminished muscular activities of the alco- 
 holic indicate an internal condition which is 
 increasing constantly. The final conclusion 
 I wish to make prominent is that the neurosis 
 of inebriety and the toxemias of alcoholism 
 constitute a distinct field for medical practice, 
 which has not yet been occupied. To-day the 
 quacks with their boasted discoveries are doing 
 the work which the educated physicians should 
 do. 
 
 " Every physician has patients of this class, 
 who need care and treatment, and yet he is 
 rarely able to understand their condition, 
 much less to give proper means and measures 
 for relief and help. 
 
 " There are hundreds of these neglected men 
 and women in every community who could be 
 restored and permanently cured who now, 
 through neglect, drift into the ranks of crimi- 
 nals, paupers and dependents, becoming incur- 
 able and burdens. Physicians themselves fur- 
 nish a proportion of victims, which is pitiful, 
 because preventable. 
 
 ^' If our medical schools would teach the 
 facts that are at present known, a revolution 
 would follow at once. The few workers on 
 
THERAPEUTICS * 137 
 
 this frontier land realize possibilities that are 
 startling in the study and treatment of in- 
 ebriates and alcoholics. 
 
 " What we need is to put aside the tradi- 
 tions of the past, which have come down to 
 us as settled facts, and when examined in the 
 light of modern science are delusions of the 
 most pronounced character. Teachers, lead- 
 ers and varied interests, both commercial and 
 otherwise, hold us back from scientific inves- 
 tigation and the application of means and reme- 
 dies that will effectually clear away the fog- 
 banks of delusions and traditions that hang 
 about this great modern plague." 
 
 In this statement there is no real blame laid 
 upon medical science; and if the physicians 
 were, in old days, too slow in popularizing 
 their medical learning that reproach is no 
 longer just. Their modern therapeutical lit- 
 erature is ample and lies ready to the hand. 
 Only the more elderly doctors fail to recog- 
 nize that the measure of a man's drunkenness 
 is the measure of his mental impairment and 
 his physical degeneration. There is no dis- 
 agreement as to the symptoms of the disease; 
 there is slight diversity as to the treatment. 
 
138 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 And here is the main fact. 
 
 Your inebriate — swept by periodic drink- 
 storms — is ill; your moderate drinker, tippling 
 diurnally, is ill; now the kind of treatment 
 demanded by his alcoholic state depends upon 
 his general health; and — I would emphasize 
 this — only the qualified medical man can pre- 
 scribe the special medicinal treatment suited 
 to his case. (And by the " qualified medical 
 man " I do not mean the rosy, obese, port- 
 wine-y physician, whereof there has been 
 mention; I distinctly mean the physician who 
 is an expert in the disease of inebriety, exactly 
 as his confrere is an expert in pulmonary tu- 
 berculosis or in diseases of the eye.) In such 
 a patient one thing has been assumed. It has 
 been taken for granted that he has the Will- 
 to-be-Sober. The assumption is that he wishes 
 to check the degenerations due to alcohol. 
 Whether he can ever be the man he was, 
 physically, mentally, morally, is a question 
 only his physician can determine, but unques- 
 tionably medical science can put him back 
 among sober men. It may be the drink obses- 
 sion will vanish — in obedience to what laws 
 and forces I know not — merely that other 
 
THERAPEUTICS 139 
 
 psychoses may take its place; or the physical 
 degenerations and disorders may persist, long 
 after the alcoholic causes have been abolished. 
 So, possibly, there is a sad price to be paid; 
 but if he have the Will-to-be-Sober, science 
 can take him in hand, make him sober, keep 
 him sober — exactly as it can mend a broken 
 leg, though not perhaps without leaving a scar 
 and a limp. 
 
 And so I am leaving the therapeutics to 
 the qualified men of medical science, for each 
 case, as I have said, is an individual one. 
 There are no cure-alls. 
 
 There is, however, another side to the treat- 
 ment which falls within the purpose of this 
 book; and that is the moral side. It is of 
 equal importance. Indeed, without it the 
 medical treatment is a mere crutch. The prob- 
 lem is not without its difficulty. 
 
 Here, for example, is the man who does not 
 get drunk. He is not one of those who 
 
 " Go mad and beat their wives, 
 Plunge, after shocking lives, 
 Razors and carving-knives 
 Into their gizzards." 
 
I40 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 He takes his drink in a gentlemanly way, at 
 home, in his club; he is always, more or less, 
 in a low-keyed state of alcoholic stimulation. 
 Both in the legal and social sense of the word 
 he is ^^ sober " — maintaining, that is, a fair 
 level of equilibrium. Of all drinking men 
 he is the hardest to cure. He has not the 
 Will-to-be-Sober. He has not yet incurred 
 the savager penalties — physical and mental — 
 of alcoholism. And, therefore, he can still 
 laugh at the dark forecasts of the qualified 
 medical man. Moreover, you cannot appeal 
 to his moral nature. That part of him is con- 
 fused and darkened. His very way of life 
 strips him of the qualities that make most for 
 moral discriminations. If you appeal to him 
 on moral grounds, he stares at you; it is like 
 arguing about color with a blind man. 
 
 And here psychology has a word to say. 
 
 Drunkenness, psychologically considered, is 
 a kind of monomania — what is called a perver- 
 sion of attention. The drunkard can give his 
 attention only to one series of suggestions — 
 like your hypnotized subject. So far as other 
 suggestions are concerned, his senses are dulled. 
 His interest is centered on that one thing. In 
 
THERAPEUTICS 141 
 
 a lesser degree the same thing is true of the 
 moderate drinker. Consciously or subcon- 
 sciously, too large a part of his life is centered 
 in that ounce-or-two-a-day of alcohol. 
 
 How are you going to shift his interest? 
 
 He is deaf to the moral appeal. Indeed, 
 before he can even hear it you must rebuild 
 his character, which his way of life has de- 
 graded. It is only by making him alive to 
 new interests that you can shake him out of 
 his dull absorption in the pleasure to be got 
 from the warmth and glow and excitement of 
 drink. 
 
 You must put something else into his life. 
 
 How true this is — how one interest drives 
 out another — you might have seen in the first 
 few months of the war, had you been in Eu- 
 rope. A few days after the storm broke I was 
 in one of the great hotels in Lucerne, where 
 a cosmopolitan " smart set " was gathered, 
 idling in hundreds. Now, the basis of that 
 social life was drink — from the rosy Briton 
 who marked the time of day by successive 
 whiskies-and-soda, and the graceful Frenchman 
 for whom five o'clock meant absinthe, to the 
 beer-drinkers for whom time did not exist. 
 
142 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 War came; and a strange thing happened. The 
 series of drink-suggestions was broken in upon 
 by the vivider and more compelling thought 
 of war. And men stopped drinking long be- 
 fore the nations put the ban on drink. I have 
 still in mind a red-faced Englishman who stood 
 one day in the deserted bar of the National. 
 It had been his boast that he had been weaned 
 on brandy; and, though he had never been 
 ^' drunk " in his life, he said, he had never gone 
 without his five " tots " of brandy a day. A 
 glass of it stood on the bar in front of 
 him. He lifted the glass and set it down 
 again. 
 
 " What's the matter with it? " I asked. 
 
 " Somebody has put a corpse in the barrel,'' 
 he said, and went away, leaving the tall glass 
 on the bar. 
 
 A mightier interest had slain in him the 
 old, habitual monomania for alcohol. There 
 was a discord between the dirty exhilaration 
 of drink and the high and splendid vibrations 
 wakened in him by humanity's peril in a world 
 at war. And what was true of that man was 
 true of every man in the war-zone. In the 
 first two months of the war, in all that tragic 
 
THERAPEUTICS 143 
 
 world behind the three-hundred-mile battle- 
 line, I saw only one man drunk. And uni- 
 versal reprobation pursued him as he reeled 
 along. It was as though humanity had been 
 blasted into sobriety by the mere horror of 
 war. 
 
 A new interest. 
 
 And with your drinking-man — especially 
 your moderate drinker — a similar rule holds 
 good; there must be a new interest to drive out 
 the old one. You must bear in mind that you 
 can expect little aid from him. In him un- 
 selfish interest is at its lowest. The power 
 of attention in him is weak. His energy, too, 
 is at low ebb. Any influence must be from 
 without. 
 
 II 
 
 You can't knock him on the head. 
 
 It is not being done, although the medical 
 books are full of instances of men who have 
 been accidentally knocked into a new way of 
 thought and action. There is a notable case 
 of a burglar who was regenerated by a chimney- 
 pot falling on his head. A " new area of nerv- 
 ous mechanism " was called into being and it 
 
144 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 was cerebrally impossible for the man to go 
 on being the burgling kind of man he was be- 
 fore the accident. Now you cannot knock the 
 drinking-man's head about, but you can knock 
 at his heart. You can give him a new interest. 
 And at last analysis you will find that every 
 attempt at getting him to be sober is based 
 upon a recognition of this old truth, which 
 is known as the physiology of change. It is 
 a truth and it is a law of organic evolution: 
 whatever is new prevails — at least for the time 
 being. A shift in the kaleidoscope — a new 
 view of life — awakens a new and exclusive 
 interest. The invention of the moving-picture 
 took thousands of men away from drink, for it 
 absorbed their attention in a new line of 
 thought. They got their exhilaration through 
 the eye instead of by way of the stomach. A 
 new enthusiasm drove out the old monomania. 
 This is the kind of ^' reform " brought about 
 by the vehement rhetoric of the Billy Sunday 
 sort. This is what happens in the slum- 
 mission when some degraded wretch stumbles 
 forward, dazed with the sudden blaze of new 
 interest, and '' gets religion." A wilder emo- 
 tionalism has swept away the old monomania. 
 
THERAPEUTICS 145 
 
 Now it is exactly true that often the old habit 
 is thus destroyed — as though a chimney-pot had 
 fallen upon it; and that the new interest 
 builds up strength of character, purpose, 
 honor. 
 
 The love interest is quite as potent. You 
 will have observed that the man in love — if 
 his love be of the finer sort — usually, in fact 
 always, turns away from his cups. The moods 
 and emotions of altruistic love are incompatible 
 with the coarser and more selfish exhilarations 
 of drink. The true lover foregoes even his 
 ounce-a-day. This high enthusiasm of a new- 
 found love may not last any more than the 
 slum-drunkard's fiery absorption in religion, 
 but even though it pass away it proves the 
 point that the drink-interest can be driven out 
 by a stronger interest. And this is what you 
 must give your alcohol-habited man. You 
 must give him some stark form of self-interest 
 that will appeal to him more than alcohol does 
 — an interest which is either more intense or, 
 on the other hand, more extensive. Men have 
 found it in love, in religion; men have found 
 it in socialism; one man finds it in pugilism 
 and another in politics; but until he has found 
 
146 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 it there is only absurdity in supposing that he 
 will give up the one satisfying interest he finds 
 in a life which is otherwise dull and flat- 
 leveled. 
 
 Drunkard and moderate drinker alike, you 
 have got to give them a new interest in life 
 or you cannot expect them to desert the old 
 one. It must be given to them. For centered 
 in a selfishness, which increases in steady pro- 
 gression, they cannot reach out themselves and 
 get it. Sometimes, you say? There have been 
 instances, of course, where men exerted the 
 Will-to-be-Sober and became sober; but in 
 almost every case you will find the impulse 
 came from without. Love went by in the 
 street and called to them; or ambition knocked 
 loudly at the door; and the dull senses heard 
 and woke. And you, if you would win a 
 man from drink, must first find the one interest 
 compelling enough to tempt him from his 
 monomania. Only through an intimate knowl- 
 edge of his character — or his type of character 
 — can you succeed, just as only the '' qualified 
 medical man," who has made a study of his 
 physical body, can decide upon the suitable 
 medical treatment. The problem is personal 
 
THERAPEUTICS 147 
 
 to each man. The way back to sobriety is not 
 a beaten highway; it is made up of infinite 
 bypaths. 
 
 Some years ago a fantastically named '^ cure " 
 for the drink habit was widely advertised. It 
 originated in a dreary little town in the Mid- 
 dle West. And thither were drawn many pa- 
 thetic victims of alcohol. The story of one 
 of them was as tragic as the dark undoing 
 of Edgar Allan Poe. Old New Yorkers will 
 remember him, for as '' Felix Oldboy " he 
 wrote, in many a lovable page, the story of 
 that old New York which has long been a 
 part of the romantic past. He had been a 
 soldier — colonel, I think, in the United States 
 Army. Withal he was a gentle, scholarly man, 
 a writer of charm and distinction. And for 
 twenty years he was an inebriate — a dipsoma- 
 niac, swept every now and then into dark 
 abysses of drunkenness. He drew frightful 
 prose-pictures of that descent — down-going into 
 a gulf comparable to the depths of the sea, into 
 the " habitation of the monsters of silence." 
 He heard of this new ^^ cure " and determined 
 to try it, as he had tried so many others of 
 the kind. In him the Will-to-be-Sober never 
 
148 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 wholly died. And he went, a thousand miles 
 from home, to the dingy little prairie village. 
 There he found hundreds of others, men like 
 himself, haunted by hope of liberation — " My 
 comrades were lawyers, physicians, editors, 
 merchants, three judges, the attorney-general 
 of a Western state, an ex-congressman and an 
 assorted lot of state senators." In due time 
 he returned to New York " cured." In the 
 North American Review he proclaimed his 
 victory over drink and signed it with his name, 
 John Flavel Mines, LL.D. It was a paean of 
 joy; it was a hymn of regeneration; and it was 
 the most pathetically tragic page ever penned 
 by a hope-haunted man. The article was still 
 new from the press, was still making its sensa- 
 tional way over the land, when the end came. 
 One night the police picked a drunkard out 
 of the gutter of a New York street — a thing 
 plunged in mud and coma. They picked it 
 up and carted it away. It was all that was left 
 of John Flavel Mines, LL.D. He died the 
 next day in a public hospital. He had made 
 the last fight of his Will-to-be-Sober; he had 
 buried his dream in the gutter. 
 
 This fragment of history has a meaning. It 
 
THERAPEUTICS 149 
 
 is pertinent to what I have tried to state in 
 this chapter. In this ^' cure " there was one 
 of the elements upon which I have laid em- 
 phasis. You may call it the physiology of 
 change — its psychology, if you will. There 
 was the journey of a thousand miles, the change 
 from high activities of his life in New York 
 to the shabby quiet of the prairie village; there 
 were the new companions, " lawyers, physi- 
 cians, editors, three judges and the ex-con- 
 gressman"; above all, there was the new 
 interest — the hope born of the very mystery 
 in which the weird alchemy of the cure was 
 enwrapped. Here was change — itself a mighty 
 alchemist; here was the new compelling in- 
 terest which rode down the monomania of 
 drink. 
 
 What was lacking was the second element 
 of the cure — the special medicinal treatment 
 which only the qualified medical man, know- 
 ing the patient as an airman knows his motor, 
 could prescribe. For it was the physical man 
 who was ill. Assume, if you will, that the 
 obsession had been driven out of the house; 
 still was the house a battered and tottering thing 
 — the doors on broken hinges, swinging to any 
 
I50 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 dark psychosis (of drink or madness) that 
 cared to shoulder its way in. 
 
 The case of that poor, dead man of alcohol 
 is an exceptional one; but in it are the gen- 
 eral and essential facts which have to do 
 with all attempts to cure a drunkard. And 
 in a lesser degree they are applicable to the 
 moderate drinker, as he is called. The drink 
 must be got out of the man and a moral tone 
 got into the man; but all this will lead no 
 whither at all, unless the poisoned body be 
 set right. 
 
 And the conclusion is plain: 
 
 Drunkard or light-tippling man, he can be 
 brought back to the sober way of life if there 
 can be wakened in him the Will-to-be-Sober. 
 And then a new interest driving out the old 
 will serve to hold him to his purpose; new 
 activities will help to transform his desires; 
 but all this is a mere beginning. Only the 
 qualified physician, who knows the etiology 
 of the case and the physical peculiarities of 
 the man, can complete and affirm the cure. 
 
 And I would point out one thing; 
 
 Just as alcoholic poisoning begins at the 
 top, paralyzing first what is best and finest in 
 
THERAPEUTICS 151 
 
 man, so must the cure there begin. The weak 
 and heedless will must be wakened — the atten- 
 tion directed to higher interests — and then there 
 must be made for this regenerated Ego a clean 
 and safe physical home. Of course in cases of 
 darker degradation and disease the treatment 
 must be reversed and the bodily tenement 
 cleaned out first in the uncertain hope that 
 a decent guest may take possession of it. These 
 are the cases that demand external control — 
 since will is dead; and they belong to the 
 penological part of the subject. What is true 
 here is this: The man in whom the Will-to-be- 
 Sober still lives and asserts itself (be he in- 
 ebriate or a cleanlier, clubbable, socially- 
 possible alcoholic) can go back to the sober 
 way of life — even though he limp a bit, in 
 token of his adventures, to the end of his days. 
 A thing worth knowing. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CRIME, DRINK-STORMS AND 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 What alcohol does to the individual you have 
 seen — the picture is a gloomy one. 
 
 There is, as you know, a tragic side to the 
 law of evolution ; for, while it works for the 
 type and not for the mass, for the individual 
 and not the collectivity, yet it has chained 
 the two, indissolubly, together. The indi- 
 vidual is required, ^^ under pain of being 
 stunted and enfeebled in his own development," 
 to carry others along with him in his evolu- 
 tionary progress. In other words, your good is 
 conditioned in the good of all. Of course it 
 is a law of life that the strongest shall sur- 
 vive; but here is the point — step by step with 
 the evolution of the organism (man) there 
 must go on an evolution of environment. Civ- 
 ilization (a pretty word) is merely the pro- 
 
 152 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 153 
 
 gressive modification of social conditions so 
 that the weak may survive and grow out of 
 their weakness. You may prefer to de.Qne 
 civilization in other terms and phrases; bur 
 you cannot get away from the essential fact 
 that it is an evolution of environment, always 
 coincident with human evolution. 
 
 And what, then, does alcohol do to the state ^ 
 
 I shall try and put the case for the United 
 States in a critically just-minded way, without 
 color and (as the lawyers say) without coven. 
 
 The statistical abstract of the United States 
 for 1913 has some staggering figures. 
 
 For instance the annual drink-bill of the 
 United States amounts to $2,336,662,338.00. 
 
 Of course that is a meaningless progression 
 of numerals. One cannot open one's mind to 
 them. A more understandable statement is 
 that the city of New York spends one million 
 dollars a day for drink— precisely three hun- 
 dred and sixty-five million dollars in the year 
 1913. Back in 1870, with a more largely na- 
 tive population, the consumption of liquors was 
 just under eight gallons " per head " — the re- 
 port states; to-day it has risen to over twenty- 
 two gallons for every individual counted in 
 
154 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 the census. This is an enormous fact, not easily 
 realized. The statistical mind tries to think 
 of it as a flood of intoxicants, filling a chan- 
 nel in which the American navy — and mer- 
 chant marine — could float in easeful roominess. 
 A grimmer way to read the lesson is in terms 
 of crime, insanity, vice. That million a day 
 New York City spends on drink is the lesser 
 expense. She pays more than that to foot the 
 bills for damage done. 
 
 Crime and drink are almost one and the 
 same thing; almost. 
 
 When a Lord Chief Justice of England said: 
 " If sifted, nine-tenths of the crime of Eng- 
 land and Wales could be traced to drink," 
 the statement had a repellent air — as though 
 it were born of the uncritical fervor of a popu- 
 lar orator. I put it by. But in this country 
 the facts, carefully collated, come within meas- 
 urable distance of his statement. The famous 
 investigation made by the Massachusetts Bu- 
 reau of Labor Statistics showed that eighty- 
 four per cent, of all the criminals under convic- 
 tion in that state were drink-made criminals. 
 Almost nine-tenths, as you see. Were Massa- 
 chusetts not boozily organized, nine-tenths, 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 155 
 
 almost, of her prisoned criminals would be 
 free men, innocent of crime, fit for the service 
 of the state. It is not merely that the so- 
 cial customs of Massachusetts make for drink 
 — and crime; she is knowingly and willfully 
 making criminals in her state-licensed insti- 
 tutions, which she euphemistically calls sa- 
 loons, cafes and public-houses. In return she 
 gets a certain number of dollars and a defi- 
 nite amount of crime, which ranges from theft 
 to murder. 
 
 And you do not need to take only the sta- 
 tistics of that Eastern commonwealth. Every 
 state tells the same story. Every commu- 
 nity — every social class — bears confirmation. 
 Crime is the progeny of drink — nine-tenths 
 of it, almost. I take the word of a man who 
 is an authority. His way of life has been such 
 that he knows well one definite class of men — 
 the United States Army. And he says that 
 practically ^' all the crime committed in the 
 armiy, directly or indirectly, can be traced to 
 alcohol." That man is Colonel L. Mervin 
 Maus, who has just retired after forty-one years' 
 service in the medical corps. He is the man 
 who organized the public-health service in 
 
156 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 the Philippines and cleaned Manila of bu- 
 bonic plague, leprosy and smallpox — of most 
 bad pests save that of drink. If any man be 
 an authority he is an authority. A nation's 
 crime is in exact proportion, he says, to its 
 consumption of alcohol. You cannot get away 
 from it; crime is imbedded in alcohol, like a 
 triangle in a circle. 
 
 " During the past year there were about 
 2,000,000,000 gallons of wine, beer, whisky, 
 brandy, gin and other alcoholic drinks con- 
 sumed in the United States, which cost the 
 people as many dollars. The expenditure of 
 this vast sum of money is not only materially 
 responsible for the misery, poverty, robberies, 
 murders and crimes of our people, but for hun- 
 dreds of thousands of deaths and the large 
 army of ^ intellectually dead,' who are to be 
 found in our insane asylums, feeble-minded and 
 epileptic institutions. 
 
 " Recent studies of the vital statistics of 
 the country have revealed an alarming increase 
 in the diseases of degeneracy, and it has be- 
 come necessary to take an inventory of the 
 moral and physical stock of the people. This 
 condition is principally due to intemperance, 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 157 
 
 immorality and vice diseases, and unless there 
 be a general reformation in the moral con- 
 science and habits of the people our great re- 
 public, like ancient Babylon, Nineveh, Greece 
 and Rome, will in turn wither and die. 
 
 "From a careful study of the statistics of 
 the country, it is believed that America is in- 
 flicted with nearly a million degenerates and 
 criminals at a cost of at least $250,000,000 
 annually. 
 
 "Among these unfortunates we find: 
 
 Insane 200,000 
 
 Feeble-minded ; 250,000 
 
 Deaf and dumb 100,000 
 
 Blind 100,000 
 
 Juvenile delinquents in institutions . . . 50,000 
 
 Paupers 100,000 
 
 Prisoners and criminals 150,000 
 
 "Which gives a grand total of 950,000" 
 
 Thus Colonel Maus, writing in the Medical 
 Record; and for this widespread racial de- 
 generation he holds responsible alcohol — " our 
 racial poison." And out of this degeneration 
 comes crime, as pus comes from a sore. 
 
158 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 I admit that statistics are dreary things. 
 They never seem to be alive and talking to 
 one; the numerals file by like mutes at a 
 funeral. But this army of one million drink- 
 begotten criminals and degenerates is impres- 
 sive. Only fourteen per cent, of them, re- 
 member, are plain criminals — men and women 
 of whom it may be said that crime delights 
 'em; crime-delighting men, who bag their 
 trousers at the knee praying for more crime; 
 only fourteen per cent.; the others were 
 draughted into the army of crime and degen- 
 eracy by drink. 
 
 "But I, thank Heaven! can drink and be 
 sober," you persist in saying; "just as I can 
 drink and be honest." 
 
 And I admit that you do not belong to this 
 wastage and refuse of our boozily organized 
 society. You are a decent man fain to live in 
 a decent state, but you cannot get that decent 
 state in which you fain would live so long 
 as the drink-bred million prowls in the mews 
 and alleys or squats on your doorstep. The 
 individual is linked to the mass; and you are 
 tied to the million. (The rotten bees foul 
 the whole hive.) Why should you laugh 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 159 
 
 lightly at the suggestion that you — and yours 
 — may be swept away into that criminal per- 
 centage of the victims of alcohol? Of course 
 the odds against it are heavy — from a statis- 
 tical viewpoint. And you can take the long 
 chance, because your special environment is 
 not one that fosters crime. Your instincts are 
 anti-criminal. (Even as a boy you never 
 robbed an orchard or threw stones at the par- 
 son's cat.) And so, though alcohol may hob- 
 nail your liver, it cannot put the leg-irons on 
 you and lock on you the door of a cell. Prob- 
 ably you are right. Like most moderate drink- 
 ers you will probably die before degeneration 
 has had its way with you; and your poisoned 
 progeny will put up a tombstone over you, 
 on which the uncynical may read: ''He Has 
 Stopped Drinking/' But alcohol is a curious 
 thing. It is, often, as lawless in its mani- 
 festations as electricity. Its ordinary way of 
 work is to degenerate its man, making for gen- 
 eral mental and organic degeneracy, with pro- 
 gressive waning of the intellectual faculties. 
 Now and then it has another way. Instead of 
 slowly undermining its man, it attacks him 
 furiously at intervals. Now and then; at an 
 
i6o DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 unforeseen moment, out of the blue, a drink- 
 storm beats upon him and sweeps him away 
 from his moral moorings. (You know all 
 about that dipsomaniacal person; usually he 
 is the man of finer brain and more delicately 
 adjusted intellect.) The best man, who drinks, 
 is never sure that crime may not get him ; that, 
 when his moral discrimination is put to sleep 
 by the drug, a strange new criminality may 
 not start up in him. 
 
 The chance is one in a hundred? 
 
 If it be only one in a thousand, it is a 
 bad chance to take and it is on the edge of 
 this peril that one finds the most awful and 
 the most sad tragedies of life. One such ad- 
 venture in life haunts me. It has haunted 
 me for many years; and will, I dare say, so 
 long as I remember my life on this planet. 
 So I might as well put it down in this book. 
 
 Youth's friendship for youth is very beau- 
 tiful. 
 
 The youth I loved most was an undergradu- 
 ate at one of the English universities. Des- 
 tiny had given him birth in a famous English 
 family — near the head of it. He was a tall, 
 slight boy, with the dreamy blue eyes of the 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION i6i 
 
 mystic. I remember his long, white hands 
 and a way he had of ruffling his grouse-colored 
 hair. He was to be a statesman; it was a tradi- 
 tion in his family; and as we walked the road 
 — ^' at Trompington, not far from Cantebrigge, 
 there goeth a streme and over it a brigge " — he 
 built his dream. What a dream of world's 
 work it was! And what a Utopia he was to 
 establish in the fair land where Sir Thomas 
 More built up that earlier dream! Withal he 
 took life on its hedonistic side. Once, I re- 
 member, we had wandered far afield, debating 
 the old Utopian book, and a winter night shut 
 down on us. We went into a little wayside 
 inn for dinner; and took what we could get. 
 It was an ale-house and there was no wine to 
 be had. And I remember his pathetic ex- 
 clamation: 
 
 ^' How can a gentleman dine without a half- 
 pint of claret? " 
 
 Now in the horoscope of this grave and gen- 
 tle lad there was the maddest night ever writ- 
 ten by the stars. I did not witness it; I was 
 not even in England; but what happened I 
 know and I know the end. He had been 
 studying hard, and late in the afternoon he 
 
1 62 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 rode out for an hour or so — those were the 
 days when youth took its pleasure on a horse; 
 and he came back and dressed to dine in town 
 with some friends. There you have him at a 
 trifle before eight o'clock. He had never 
 been drunk in his life; he was the half-pint-of- 
 claret sort of man; the man who wets his pipe 
 with a glass or two of whisky-and-soda; a 
 clean-mannered man who had as soon think of 
 drinking to excess as of rolling in the kennel 
 like a dog. Where he went that evening I 
 do not know. The bolt from the blue struck 
 him. At ten o'clock he was a drink-mad 
 maniac, scouring the streets of the town, with 
 an American revolver (Heaven knows where 
 he got it; I have forgotten) in his hand; and 
 five minutes later he shot and killed a con- 
 stable who expostulated with him in the kindly 
 British way. They hanged that boy. In spite 
 of the mighty weight of his family name, in 
 spite of his dazed defense, in spite of the 
 evident madness of that drink-storm, they 
 hanged him on a gallows. I have no quarrel 
 with the stern equity of English law; but on 
 a higher gallows I had hanged the man who 
 sold the poison that maddened him. 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 163 
 
 ^' I don't remember anything about it," was 
 all he could say. How could he? Science to- 
 day would have made clear that he was in 
 an alcoholic trance. When he went out to kill, 
 the real man in him — the man I knew and 
 loved, the dreamer of Utopia — was dead and 
 blind. I do not care to write any more about 
 this boy's life and death; only this: No man, 
 who plays with the lawless forces of alcohol, 
 knows where or when the bolt from the blue 
 may strike. No man knows. For inexorably 
 as a triangle is imbedded in a circle, there is 
 hidden in alcohol the swift potentiality of 
 crime. At just what period of super-saturation 
 it will flash out neither your physiologist 
 nor your psychologist can tell. (Wherefore 
 drink, dear man, and be sober, and bide your 
 time.) 
 
 I knew another man — 
 
 You may be aware that the medical men 
 have studied with extreme attention, in recent 
 years, what they call the periodicity of the 
 drink neurosis. It is another way of talking 
 about the bolt from the blue. There is, for 
 example, the drink neurotic who abstains for 
 distinct periods and then suddenly breaks out 
 
1 64 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 into drunkenness, which science can but attrib- 
 ute to unknown (as yet) cyclic degenerations. 
 And one of the alienists says: 
 
 " To the unreasoning public and the fool- 
 ish theorist this is simply vice — an outbreak 
 of the animal instincts and the beast part of 
 the man. The most delusive and stupid 
 theories have begot a great literature in ex- 
 planation of these two widely differing con- 
 ditions. The statement that it is simply a 
 gathering and breaking of morbid energies and 
 activities of the brain and nervous functions, 
 governed by distinct physical laws, is not recog- 
 nized to any great extent." 
 
 Had it been recognized — this scientific fact 
 — many a man who has gone to the gallows 
 had gone, more justly, to an asylum for the 
 insane; and science must find a solution for 
 the perplexing and menacing problem of those 
 crimes for which alcohol, and not the man, 
 is responsible. 
 
 II 
 
 I knew another man who was hanged. 
 (I would not have you think that an undue 
 number of my acquaintances have gone that way. 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 165 
 
 There were only these two; though when I 
 think of some of the men I have known I won- 
 der how they escaped it.) I cannot tell you 
 this man's name. He was a man of breeding 
 and scholarly culture; and all this was evident 
 when I saw him, first, in the filth and darkness 
 of a jail. It was in a dreary town of West 
 Virginia, whither I had gone to see him 
 hanged. The town comes back to my memory. 
 It was a town a hundred years old — perhaps 
 more; it was a town of twenty thousand in- 
 habitants — perhaps more; and in it there had 
 never been anyone who was not just like 
 everyone else; not a hero in the past, not an 
 artist, not a man so slightly distinguished he 
 was worth emulating or envying; a town as un- 
 distinguished as a clay road. Collarless citi- 
 zens, in slouch hats and frock coats and black 
 trousers and muddy boots, lounged in the 
 streets and spat tobacco juice at each other. 
 The women seemed to spend most of their time 
 pulling their stockings up. And I came to the 
 jail and found my man in the cell. He had 
 been convicted of murder and was to be hanged 
 in four days. Facile journalism had dubbed 
 him, " The Man of Mystery,'' for he had re- 
 
1 66 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 fused to give his name and had been tried 
 as John Doe. He had answered no questions. 
 He had made no plea. Sullenly he had let 
 them sentence him to death without a word. 
 The sheriff, sprinkling me with tobacco-juice 
 the while, had told me the story of the crime. 
 A tramp in rags, the-man-to-be-hanged, had 
 come into town begging for food. He was 
 an amusing tramp from the viewpoint of these 
 slouch-hatted West Virginians; in the first 
 place, he was English and his pronunciation 
 of the language, differing from that of West 
 Virginia, was screamingly absurd; moreover, 
 round his ankles were buttoned ragged spats 
 — dirty insignia of fallen gentility. Where- 
 upon the tavern-wags had sport with him; 
 and filled his empty belly with the kind of 
 whisky drunk in those parts. Then they 
 kicked the gentleman in dirt and rags out of 
 their town — which was equally distinguished 
 both for dirt and rags. A few hours later 
 they found him in a drunken sleep by the 
 railway tracks. And thirty yards away, at the 
 door of his shanty, lay murdered the old man 
 whose duty it had been to watch the cross- 
 ing — or switch the trains — at that point. So 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 167 
 
 they tried the tramp (always sullen and silent) 
 for the murder and ordered him hanged; and 
 from forty miles about the interested natives 
 were swarming in over the muddy roads to be 
 on hand for the festival. 
 
 He was crouched in the back of his dirty 
 cell. I think what brought him forward to 
 the bars in the door was the fact that I did 
 not speak to him in West Virginian — a lan- 
 guage he had taken a dislike to, it would 
 seem. After a while the man who had been 
 dumb so long spoke. Before the day was 
 done he told me all he was ever to tell on this 
 earth. There wasn't much in the story — ex- 
 cept that bolt from the blue. What had hap- 
 pened to him was due to two things: First, 
 he had come into two thousand pounds — a sum 
 of no importance in itself, but full of possi- 
 bilities when one is young; and, second, cer- 
 tain real-estate speculators in the Southern 
 States were printing glowing advertisements 
 in the English newspapers — and he read and 
 believed. He brought his money to the " New 
 South," with the pleasant hope of building a 
 home and making a career. It took the sharp- 
 ers of that part of the world exactly six months 
 
1 68 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 to get his money away from him. He was 
 ashamed to write home. A few months more — 
 living on his rings and watch and clothes — 
 and he was in the street. And he set out to 
 tramp to the seashore, or some port where he 
 might find a ship he could work his way home 
 in. By what devious routes I know not he 
 wandered into West Virginia. It was after- 
 noon by the time he had told me this much 
 of the story. My influence with the sheriff 
 had grown during the day and now the cell 
 door was open and the murderer and I were 
 sitting together in the cell on the bench that 
 served him for a bed; and smoking. 
 
 " Tell me about the tavern-wags," I 
 said; and he told me about the tavern- 
 wags. 
 
 ^' After that,'^ said he, '^ I remember noth- 
 ing — nothing at all — until I woke in a cell. 
 I think someone kicked me in the face and I 
 woke." 
 
 "Did you kill the old man?" 
 
 " God knows," he said, and took his hairy 
 head in his hands, " I do not know. You 
 see, I used to be a gentleman and I was never 
 drunk before — I do not know." He kept re- 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 169 
 
 peating that the horror of it was that he did 
 not know. 
 
 Drink neurosis; alcoholic trance; the bolt 
 from the blue — call it what you will. It is 
 quite true; he did not know; in this world he 
 never was to know; drink and the tavern-wags 
 had plunged him into a cloud of nescience, 
 and who was to say that murder had not hap- 
 pened in the cloud? 
 
 I wanted to do something; I wanted him to 
 give me his name that I might telegraph to 
 his ambassador; I wanted to get a lawyer and 
 try for appeal; and his answer was: ^' What 
 could I do with life now? Death is kinder 
 than a cell for life." He would have nothing 
 done. John Doe was name enough to be 
 hanged in. One thing he said at last. 
 
 '^ There is one favor you can do me," he 
 said. 
 
 ^^ril do it, John Doe." 
 
 " You see, I don't mind asking you — ^you 
 are the only man of my class I've met 
 since " 
 
 He was not a snob and I was not a snob; 
 he meant that we belonged to the bathing class. 
 His request was that I should persuade the 
 
I70 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 sheriff to let him have a bath. I got it for 
 him, though the sheriff laughed like a loon — 
 to him the bath habit was as ridiculous as the 
 spat-wearing habit. And I had a barber sent 
 in who cut his tangled hair and shaved the hair 
 off his face — what looked out at me was a pale, 
 tragic-faced boy not more than twenty-two 
 years old. 
 
 I said: "Good-night, I'll come as early as 
 I can in the morning." 
 
 He stood looking at his rags. 
 
 " And I'll bring you some clothes," I added. 
 
 He laughed briefly in a sort of timid way. 
 
 "Have you got a suit of evening clothes?" 
 he said foolishly. " It would remind me of 
 something. Perhaps you will understand." 
 
 I did not have evening clothes with me; 
 in those days one did not take that sort of 
 thing to West Virginia; but I telegraphed for 
 them and they came. What the working of 
 his mind was I do not know; I do not know 
 what memory of another hour and another 
 place was in his mind; but that winter morn- 
 ing he stood up to be hanged in white linen 
 and the livery society has ordained for even- 
 ing. A few hours later they put his body, 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 171 
 
 still dressed that way, in a pit of lime; and 
 slouch-hatted men, as they covered it up, 
 spat tobacco-juice on it. 
 
 It was a grey morning, I remember, without 
 rain. I went with him to the gallows; and 
 together we looked out over the throng that 
 filled the square — farmers and their wives and 
 children in picnic-wagons, negroes, slouch- 
 hatted men and lean women — stooping to pull 
 up their stockings; a throng and a mob. It 
 was a gallows with a trap. He stood erect 
 while they tightened the fastenings on his 
 legs. He threw back his head and looked 
 away toward the East — over the mob, beyond 
 the horizon, to the sea and the home beyond 
 the sea. And from his mouth there came a 
 cry so strange and compelling that still at 
 night I hear it ringing in my ears and wake 
 with a start — a wild cry, fierce and sudden 
 as trumpets: 
 
 '' Good-by, Nellie— Nellie— Nellie! " 
 
 Three times; and in some far-away English 
 village it beat, I know, upon a woman's heart, 
 and struck her down. 
 
 Then the trap fell; the boyish figure in its 
 grotesque livery of black and white dropped 
 
172 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 out of sight into the strangling horror of death; 
 and underneath the scaffold the hangman 
 clutched the dying legs and hung to them with 
 all his weight to make death sure. 
 
 A bolt from the blue ; that's the way it struck 
 one man I knew. His name was John Doe. 
 Of course you, being Richard Roe, are not 
 John Doe. You can drink and be sober, and 
 are smilingly incredulous of these mythical 
 bolts from the blue. 
 
 Well; there is one thing worth thinking 
 over; alcohol has two ways of getting its man — 
 by increased doses and by the progressive poi- 
 son effect of the same small dose regularly 
 repeated ; but even if you dodge those two ways, 
 no man can say he is safe from the third wild, 
 lawless and crashing way that strikes the brain 
 into sudden confusion and makes for crime. 
 Even the alienists have not uncovered that 
 secret of alcohol; and who are you to boast that 
 you are immune? Richard Roe is not a whit 
 safer than John Doe — with his black moment 
 of neuro-psychiatric alcoholism. 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 173 
 
 III 
 
 Madame Tarnowsky — who is an honor to 
 Russia and to the wider world of science — 
 found, in her study of " Female Offenders," 
 that eighty-two per cent, of sinning women 
 were brought to vice by alcohol. An old and 
 dark truth; let it stand here without com- 
 ment. For these unhappy victims alcohol is 
 that river Bulicame (in truer sense than Dante 
 knew) whose waters were portioned out among 
 the sinful women. Were it not for alcohol 
 eighty-two women out of every hundred of 
 the damned— would have pure faces and sinless 
 eyes. That was the madness they drank of, ere 
 they had the desperate courage to sink woman- 
 hood in vice. A fact without comment. 
 
 You have read this book to little purpose 
 if you have not learned that the certain har- 
 vest reaped by drink is insanity. I do not 
 wish to knock you about the ears with statis- 
 tics; that is an unattractive way of driving 
 the truth home; but let me put it as an axiom: 
 
 In the United States the proportion of in- 
 sanity is in exact keeping with the consump- 
 tion of alcoholic drink. 
 
174 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 The ratio is unfailing. 
 
 Take New York State; one in every two 
 hundred and ninety of the population is insane. 
 Behind this army of mad men, mad women, 
 mad children stand the thirty-five thousand 
 two hundred and seventy-five liquor dealers. 
 Look to the West and the Southwest; there in 
 fifteen states there are only twelve thousand 
 drink-vendors and in these states the insane are 
 in the ratio of one to every eight hundred 
 and eighty of the population. What do you 
 think of the contrast? 
 
 The last census of the United States shows 
 that the institutional cases of insanity are in 
 almost exact proportion to the amount of alco- 
 holic consumption. 
 
 New York with a population of 9,113,000 
 has 31,265 cases of insanity, that is one out of 
 every two hundred and ninety sons and daugh- 
 ters of the state. Then look at droughty Kansas ; 
 you may not like to look at Kansas, but in this 
 connection a study of Kansas will be' for the 
 good of your soul; it is, as you know, a drink- 
 less state — to a certain, unideal extent; and 
 here are the data: 
 
 In ninety-seven out of one hundred and five 
 
CRIME, DRINK, DEGENERATION 175 
 
 counties there are no insane. In fifty-four of 
 these counties there are no feeble-minded — non- 
 alcoholic parentage being eugenic. In ninety- 
 six counties there were no inebriates — not 
 one. And thirty-eight county poorhouses were 
 empty. In the entire state there are less than 
 six hundred paupers. The jails in sixty-five 
 counties were empty; and sixty-five counties 
 sent up not one prisoner, convict and criminal, 
 to the penitentiaries. 
 
 The relative proportion of insanity in the 
 various states is in exact keeping with the legis- 
 lative policy concerning the sale of intoxicants ; 
 thus: 
 
 Kansas i to 873 
 
 Indiana i to 609 
 
 Maine i to 590 
 
 New Hampshire i to 473 
 
 Ohio I to 449 
 
 Illinois I to 437 
 
 Rhode Island i to 436 
 
 Michigan i to 419 
 
 Wisconsin i to 376 
 
 Virginia i to 375 
 
 Connecticut i to 311 
 
 New York i to 290 
 
176 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 And so enough of statistics if this truth has 
 been driven home: insanity is the mad son 
 of alcohol. Idiocy is its driveling daughter. 
 Suicide is its despairing child. (The esti- 
 mate is that seventy-eight per cent, of the sui- 
 cides are due to alcohol.) 
 
 Upon my word that man who called drink 
 a racial curse — even he who called it a pan- 
 demic plague — spoke without exaggeration 
 and with measurable reserve. 
 
 And I hear a voice as from very far off; 
 it is your small persistent voice, repeating: 
 " I am a moderate drinker; I can drink, thank 
 Heaven! and be sane." Dear man, with your 
 ounce or two a day, you may be mentally hale 
 enough to keep out of a madhouse; but on 
 the higher functional levels you are already 
 mad — morally you are as mad as a hatter. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 
 
 One of the wisest men of our generation — ■ 
 though he has chosen to wear the cap and bells 
 of a public jester — is Finley Peter Dunne. 
 Following the bad example of Thackeray — 
 and with a wit as keen as his — he dresses his 
 wise, far-seeing philosophy in antic and gro- 
 tesque spelling; but Mr. Dooley's philosophy 
 is always a transcendent form of common sense. 
 Were I writing a social history of the United 
 States for the last two decades I should go 
 for documentation to Mr, Dooley; from him 
 I would best learn what has been the nation's 
 thought on all the great national questions, 
 as one by one they rose above the horizon. 
 Now Mr. Dooley when he pondered the 
 war problem saw that the fact of most 
 startling significance was that the nations at 
 war had placed the ban on drink. And 
 
 177 
 
178 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 in that bad spelling (which annoys me) he 
 said: 
 
 " It's sthrange, Hinnissy, how th' wurruld 
 has turned again its lifelong roommate, Jawn 
 Barleycorn. Afther rollickin' with th' old fel- 
 low f'r cinchries th' fickle public has rounded 
 on him an' is rapidly chasin' him off th' map. 
 I've told ye how it is in England. It's th' 
 same ivrywhere. In Rooshya th' polis has 
 stopped th' sale iv vodky, which is th' name 
 iv th' Rooshyan naytional brainstorm. In 
 France they've f'rbid th' cityzin to take his 
 tumbler iv absinthe. I niver tasted th' deleery- 
 ous dhrink since I was a child an' we got it 
 f r'm Mother Winslow, but it was in great favor 
 in France. . . . 
 
 "Jawn Barleycorn might have gone on f'r 
 years if it hadn't been that th' wurruld begun 
 to suspect that he was no good in a fight. That 
 knocked th' last leg fr'm undher him. I cud've 
 told th' wurruld so long ago. I've seen him 
 start a millyon fights, but niver seen him win 
 wan. He's lived f'r years on his repytation 
 as a warryor. No army was supposed to be 
 anny good without him. He was welcome in 
 th' sojers' tent an' th' gin'ral's headquarters. 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 179 
 
 People said about him: 'He's a scamp an' a 
 false friend, but he's a divvle in a scrap.' An' 
 now they know he aint anny good at that 
 ayether. His bluff has been called." 
 
 And that is truly said. The first enemy the 
 warring nations had to fight was drink. They 
 had to kill that enemy before they could go 
 about their business of killing each other. Men 
 with drink in them cannot even fight. That 
 mouse (of the anecdote) was not really a match 
 for the cat. Drink does not give courage, as 
 you have seen; all it does is to destroy the 
 moral nature in the man. Unless I said a word 
 or two of the atrocities committed in the early 
 weeks of the war the black record of drink 
 were incomplete. The way of the Germans 
 through Belgium and Northern France — above 
 all, through the tragic province of Alsace — 
 was marked by rapine, murder, mutilation, 
 looting and incendiarism. There need be no 
 doubt of this; there can be no denial; I know 
 whereof I speak. But these amiable, beer- 
 drinking, song-loving Germans, you say, are 
 not fiends? Man, man, they were drunk. They 
 looted the cellars of Louvain before they set 
 about murdering old men, mutilating children, 
 
i8o DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 violating women. The loot of the wine-cellars 
 of Champagne fired the maniacs who sowed 
 destruction in Northern France. I know a vil- 
 lage in Alsace. With pathetic gayety it wel- 
 comed the French liberators when they entered 
 the province. When the French were driven 
 back the Germans loosed a ^^ punitive expedi- 
 tion " on the hapless village, with orders to 
 punish the traitors. And they punished them. 
 They rode into the village square and (while 
 the terror-stricken people took refuge in a 
 church) they drank their fill at the tavern. 
 Then, savage with drink, they fired the poor 
 little cottages of the village. At the door 
 of the church stood the old priest. He said 
 there were only women and children and old 
 men in the church and he begged for their 
 lives. And the war-drunkards killed him where 
 he stood. They rushed into the church and 
 drove out the wretched villagers — hounded 
 them through the burning streets and out into 
 the meadows; murder, mutilation, violation, 
 infamy beyond speech were the toll of the day. 
 And what happened there happened over a 
 twenty-mile strip of territory. Now these 
 '' punitive expeditions " were made up of men 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES i8i 
 
 — but of men drunk and lust-maddened by 
 alcohol. That is the real explanation of the 
 atrocities. Germany had never been able to 
 force her brave soldiers to carry out the " pol- 
 icy of f rightfulness " unless she had first let 
 them lap at the drink. There was another 
 side to it. 
 
 I saw it in Alsace and Baden when the Ger- 
 man officers and soldiery were trying to handle 
 the fierce, panic-stricken crowds that swarmed, 
 from both sides, across the frontier. These 
 soldiers, slashing with swords, thrusting with 
 rifle-stocks, screaming contradictory orders, 
 were plain hysterics — hysterical from over- 
 doses, or from interrupted doses of alcohol. 
 The German war machine had been driven 
 more swiftly over Brabant and Flanders had 
 it been driven by sober men. And when Ger- 
 many realized this fact she, too, put the ban 
 on drink in the army. What happened in 
 Dinant could not happen in any town seized 
 to-day by German troops. What happened 
 in Dinant? It was typical of the drunken days 
 of the war — those first four weeks or so. There 
 was no more picturesque city in Europe — lying 
 beneath the mighty, church-crowned bluffs, 
 
1 82 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 with the white river at its feet. Beyond the 
 bridge was the village square. Into this vil- 
 lage square the Germans drove all the women 
 and girls. On the terraces of the taverns sat 
 the officers, drinking and looking on. The 
 drunken soldiers were loosed on the women; 
 each seized the one he would; and for hours 
 they hauled them about in a mad dance — until 
 darkness fell. And when darkness fell there 
 were horrors unspeakable in the darkness. 
 Then at dawn the drunkards fired Dinant and 
 marched away. 
 
 I do not think this was the reason Germany 
 put the ban on drink in the army; it was be- 
 cause she discovered — with Mr. Dooley — that 
 " Jawn Barleycorn was no good in a fight." 
 After those first crazed weeks she fought sober; 
 with what dark success you know. 
 
 A boozily organized army cannot fight; a 
 boozily organized nation cannot efficiently pro- 
 duce war material or establish an efficient trans- 
 port service. The danger of drunkenness in 
 time of peace becomes in time of war a mon- 
 strous peril. Every soldier realized it; every 
 statesman saw it. 
 
 But what was to be done? 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 183 
 
 For generations science, religion, statesman- 
 ship had fought this evil thing; they had pelted 
 the evil thing with tracts and tied it up in red 
 tape; all to no saving purpose. 
 
 But when, in a world at war, the need of 
 sobriety was imperative it did not take the 
 nations long to find a way of killing the evil 
 thing. It was as simple and practical as shut- 
 ting ofif an electric current. It prohibited the 
 manufacture and sale of the fiercer kinds of 
 drink. (By way of compromise it left, to 
 those so habituated to alcoholic poison they 
 could not do without it, the less harmful solace 
 of beer and wine.) Over the drunkenness of 
 the soldiers in the field a death penalty hung. 
 As for the peasant, the workingman, the citi- 
 zen whose duties lay behind the lines, they 
 were kept sober — by the prohibitive fact that 
 they could not buy enough alcohol to get 
 drunk on. 
 
 France was first in this, as she is always 
 first in the noblest missions of humanity; she 
 is the light-bearer. France was first. The day 
 after war was ruthlessly and lawlessly declared 
 upon her, she prohibited the sale of absinthe 
 in all France. This was a mere military de- 
 
1 84 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 cree; but as soon as the French parliament met 
 it passed a law prohibiting forever the manu- 
 facture, importation and sale of that worst 
 kind of alcoholic drink. 
 
 You cannot exaggerate the importance of the 
 role played by absinthe in the drama of alco- 
 holic degradation in France. The records of 
 one institution (Charenton, I think) show that 
 out of nine thousand nine hundred and thirty- 
 two cases of alcoholic alienation four thousand 
 eight hundred and eighty-two, or approxi- 
 mately half of the entire number, were caused 
 by absinthe. The serious element in the sta- 
 tistics is that they reveal an increase (merely 
 taking ten years) of fifty-seven per cent, in 
 the number of insane in the thirty-six depart- 
 ments of France. Long ago the fight on this 
 bad kind of drink began; but insurmountable 
 obstacles stood in the way. One obstacle was, 
 of course, the banded forces of the drink- 
 makers and drink-vendors; another was that 
 absinthe paid a revenue of hundreds of mil- 
 lions of francs a year to the treasury — and the 
 ministers of finance stood, greed-centered, 
 against giving up this spoil of drunkenness. 
 Indeed, in every country state-finance has been 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 185 
 
 the rock behind which the poisoners took shel- 
 ter. ^^ Without the liquor-tax what a deficit 
 there will be!" War gave swift answer to 
 that cowardly plea. What was the tax-gain 
 from liquor when dropped into the war-deficit 
 of a billion a month? 
 
 War gave the sudden lesson that you 
 cannot measure a nation's needs in terms of 
 money. 
 
 Torn away from petty considerations of 
 greed, the state was forced to face the great 
 question of the conservation of the race — the 
 health and purity of its people on which the 
 future depends. And in spite of distillers, 
 drunkards and financiers France decreed the 
 great reform — a half measure to be sure, but 
 a great measure, because it lays down the prin- 
 ciple of state prohibition. 
 
 Then the voice of Russia — that mystic home 
 of sacrificial brotherhood — was heard. By 
 a signal ukase the Czar shut up all the fac- 
 tories where vodka was made and all the 
 shops where it was sold. This was his own 
 reformation — one of the reforms that strange, 
 little, bearded dreamer has been able to bring 
 to pass in the face of his iron " advisers." Let 
 
1 86 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 it be to his credit. It was he, and no other, 
 who prepared the way for this great step, by 
 taking the traffic in vodka away from the dirty 
 retailers who passed out the poison. I re- 
 member Russia as it was in those days before 
 he set up that reform. You could go into 
 any village; there was the posting station, 
 joined to it the tavern. And that tavern was 
 the plague spot of the Mir. There the peasants 
 drank; and when their money was gone they 
 pawned their plows and carts, their tools and 
 their clothes — pawned their unsown crops and 
 mortgaged all they owned. The drink-shops 
 and pawn-shops were one. And when the gov- 
 ernment stepped in to save the slaves of the 
 pawn-ticket and the bottle — when the tavern 
 leeches were driven out and went wandering 
 over the land wailing of persecution — there 
 was the beginning of a new day in Russia. 
 The government took over the sale of vodka — 
 and sold it, like postage-stamps, at government 
 depots. It could be got only in bottles; it 
 could not be drunk on the premises; and it 
 was a pure liquor — without base adulterations; 
 and in a way it checked drunkenness. Of 
 most importance was the fact that it set the 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 187 
 
 whole bad business in one hand, so that when 
 the hour struck one hand could throttle it. 
 For years that has been the dream and pur- 
 pose of the Czar. Against him were the liquor 
 '^ interests "; against him was the official pro- 
 tector of drunkenness, the Minister of Finance, 
 who argued that one-third the revenues of the 
 state came from vodka; but war gave the pa- 
 tient little Czar his chance — and he struck. 
 For the safety of the state, for the preserva- 
 tion of the race, he struck down the monstrous 
 evil. 
 
 War is sacrificial. 
 
 It demands of a nation the supreme sacrifice. 
 At such a time a nation more readily yields 
 the lesser sacrifice. It throws into the melting- 
 pot not only its jewels and fine gold, but its 
 vices as well. 
 
 I do not assert (one were a fool to assert) 
 that France and Russia have gone abruptly to 
 sobriety. A generation, drink-poisoned from 
 youth, cannot be dragooned into clean living. 
 Drunkenness has not vanished from Russia nor 
 France; in spite of tolerably severe laws mur- 
 der, forgery, adultery, false-coining still exist. 
 But this is true: The great reform has been 
 
1 88 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 accomplished. The state is no longer an ac- 
 complice in the boozy organization of society. 
 The official drink environment that bred drunk- 
 ards — as a swamp breeds malaria — has been 
 swept away. The drunkard is no longer state- 
 bred; he is no longer a necessary creation of a 
 poisoned environment. And now, definitely, 
 he belongs to the penologist or to the alienist — 
 exactly as the murderer or the madman. The 
 state has not destroyed the drink habit. What 
 it has done is to make it difficult for the citi- 
 zen to satisfy it. Precisely the same thing it 
 does for the man given to theft — it makes it a 
 difficult trade for him and an unprofitable 
 one. 
 
 England, more timidly, attempted a similar 
 reform; but in England the rights of the state 
 have never been so emphatically declared as 
 the rights of the individual; and the proposals 
 of the government for dealing with the mis- 
 chief of drink were framed on conservative 
 lines. Their one object was to remove an 
 obstacle to the more efficient production of war 
 material. It attempted no broad '' solution,'' 
 as it is called, of the drink question. And yet 
 Parliament, in its slow-moving, cumbrous but 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 189 
 
 effective way, is working toward just such an 
 end. It has faced the problem; thus: 
 
 ^' Clearly it would be an enormous gain if 
 the direct personal financial interest of the 
 liquor trader were eliminated, and all pushing 
 of the sale of drink and all inducements to 
 the seller to evade the law were abolished. 
 That can only be done by taking the trade 
 out of the hands of those who now conduct it 
 and placing it under the control of persons 
 whose only object would be to promote the 
 public well-being, and who would have no 
 interest in pushing the sale or conniving at 
 breaches of the law: that is to say, by placing 
 it under disinterested management." 
 
 This is the road to the state control of the 
 manufacture and sale of alcohol, which is, 
 after all, the simplest and most efficacious 
 means of curbing intemperance; and it is well 
 within the rather rigid lines of English policy. 
 
 Why is it — let us put a question to each 
 other — why is it that the first great problem 
 of the nations, tested in the fire of war, was 
 that of drink? That was not true of other huge 
 wars, Grantian, Napoleonic or Caesarean. If 
 you answer the question, you will get close 
 
190 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 to the heart of what is rottenest in our civili- 
 zation. 
 
 II 
 
 Ours is the drunkennest civilization the 
 world has ever known. 
 
 Oh! I know, there are wonderful temperance 
 movements, teetotal crusades, high and strenu- 
 ous attempts to win mankind back to sanity 
 of mind and body; I know. You have seen 
 how decent society is pulling that way; how 
 the Church is pulling that way. Glancing back 
 at the memoirs of the Georgian period, even 
 those of the early Victorian age — glancing back 
 or listening to the hectic recollections of your 
 great-uncle who lived and drank in the last 
 century — you may fancy that was a drunken 
 world. And you see and hear only a part. 
 The duke and the brewer got drunk; the rich- 
 ling got drunk; but the average man, being a 
 poor man, stayed sober — reluctantly it may be, 
 but at all events he stayed sober. Look up 
 the facts. The annual output of drink was so 
 small that the consumption " per head "—to 
 repeat that dreadful phrase — was necessarily 
 small. There was not enough liquor made in 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 191 
 
 England, for example, to keep the population 
 drunk. There was only a certain quantity — 
 on the hither side of drunkenness — for each 
 individual; and the man who got drunk was 
 taking the share of five men, who were or- 
 dained, thus, to be sober. 
 
 With the rise of the age of a harsh and sav- 
 age materialism, that was neither to bind nor 
 to hold, there came strange things to pass. 
 Some of them are doubtless in your mind. Sci- 
 ence made wonderful discoveries; and in the 
 trail of the sane laborious scientists there 
 thronged all the mountebanks of thought — 
 the Huxleys and Haeckels, who beat the drum 
 in front of the booths of science. Came, too, 
 the harlequins of a dirty and materialistic 
 literature, from Zola (whose appropriate death 
 was that he should be drowned in the vomit 
 of his dogs) to that bad and sneering old 
 man, Anatole France. Morality was kicked 
 out of philosophy, as idealism was thrown out 
 of literature. The world's thought became at 
 once mean and dirty. (In poor old England 
 the most conspicuous " intellectual " was the 
 dreadful Bernard Shaw; one nation fared no 
 better than another.) 
 
192 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 Now it was in trade, manufacture and com- 
 merce that materialism expressed itself in the 
 most grotesque and irresponsible way; until, 
 as a final illustration, you had the colossal 
 Kultur of Germany — an iron monster splashed 
 with blood. 
 
 My business here and now is with the mak- 
 ing of drink in a ruthless and materialistic age. 
 Of old a nation made its drink; and drank it. 
 Wine did not go far from home; or it went 
 with difficulty and at an expense which made 
 it a drink only for the rich. Beer was brewed 
 for home needs. Liquors the same. Then 
 began the " boom " in the manufacture of all 
 things for man's needs or vices — intoxicating 
 beverages like the rest. Easy transport car- 
 ried them everywhere; but in spite of easy 
 transport there was over-production. Creating 
 intoxicating drink in huge quantities, the in- 
 dustrial world had to find means of making 
 the people drink it. It had to find consumers. 
 It was not, you note, providing drink to satisfy 
 the thirst of the nations. What it supplied 
 was far in advance of the demand. Like every 
 other industry, its one aim was to increase 
 its output. And there followed the grim need 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 193 
 
 of finding new markets. It poured its torrents 
 of wine, beer and alcohol into the home- 
 markets and sought for markets abroad. 
 
 (An illustration; I take it from the Boston 
 Herald: 
 
 " After waiting three days for favorable 
 winds, the four-masted schooner Orleans, Cap- 
 tain Rutledge, sailed to the relief of the natives 
 of the west coast of Africa with two hundred 
 thousand gallons of rum in her hold. The 
 vessel had been loading for two weeks with 
 hogsheads, casks and kegs, and when she set 
 sail every available space below hatches was 
 occupied. There was scarcely room for casks 
 of water for the crew. It was thought they 
 would have to live on rum. When this was 
 noised about there was a great scramble for 
 berths. A complement of men was signed up, 
 but all were made to sign the pledge before 
 the boat left. The underwriters demanded 
 it." 
 
 Without comment.) 
 
 What were they doing, these " industrials " 
 of beer, wine, spirits? 
 
 Building up wealth, they would tell you. It 
 was the slogan of their materialistic genera- 
 
194 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 tion. They were doing what other manufac- 
 turers did — producing all they could and forc- 
 ing the people to consume. Side by side with 
 the making of drink went a crusade of adver- 
 tisement to force the drink down. Wealth- 
 building went on apace — at the mere cost of 
 public health, sanity, morality, safety of the 
 state. And that the profits to brewer and dis- 
 tiller (these ''industrials") might be greater, 
 fraud was called in to do its work. Chem- 
 istry found dirtier and more poisonous com- 
 pounds. Industry hailed with approval the 
 German chemist who found a way of '' dis- 
 tilling brandy from sawdust." In floods tor- 
 rential the alcoholic poison was poured over 
 the lands. Waste and abuse. The govern- 
 ments, one and all, looked on without disap- 
 proval. Indeed, they shared gleefully in the 
 plunder. Often they knowingly permitted the 
 poison adulterations that their share of the 
 unclean profit might be the greater. (Go, buy 
 a bottle of beer made an5rwhere in the United 
 States, set it out in the sunlight and see what 
 will happen.) The conscience of the nation 
 was as torpid as that of a brewer. It was 
 blunted and deformed as the conscience of a 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 195 
 
 distiller. Until war came and woke it. Said 
 the State: ''I have the right to ask of each 
 man his life and goods in the face of this 
 fierce aggression — now the Uhlans are at the 
 gate — and surely I have the right to ask him 
 to sacrifice his profits and his vices, even in 
 time of peace, when they destroy the welfare 
 of the state." 
 
 It had learned a lesson. You have seen the 
 beginning. You have seen two great nations 
 toss lightly overboard the private advantages 
 of the distilling few for the sake of the gen- 
 eral welfare. There had come home to them 
 the plain truth that to abolish alcoholism 
 it had but to stop the manufacture of alcohol. 
 
 But the vested interests? 
 
 I am going to say more than a word or two 
 or three about these vested interests all in due 
 time. Here let me make one blunt statement: 
 
 There is no contradiction between ethics 
 and economics, 
 
 I say there is no contradiction between ethics 
 and economics in a civilization which is not 
 based upon greed, industrialism and a corrupt 
 materialism. I will admit that the generation 
 out of the influence of which we are pass- 
 
196 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 ing — with splendid strides — held to that bad 
 conception; but it belongs to an ante-bellum 
 past. We have gone back to Plato in this — 
 not the wealth of a nation but the highest wel- 
 fare of the citizens is the thing to be promoted. 
 And where there is discord between economics 
 and ethics, it is the economical factor that 
 must give way. The United States settled that 
 question when she swept slavery off her map; 
 and paid in blood. England, in no less noble 
 a fashion, freed the slaves under her flag, and 
 paid in gold. 
 
 I do not see how there should ever be any 
 debate as to which is to be destroyed — the huge 
 profits for a few, or the immense losses in 
 health, character, happiness, wealth for the 
 many. I, for one, shall never consent to weigh 
 dollars against human welfare. No sane man 
 would, did he understand the situation. Be- 
 hind the whole economic argument against 
 interference with drink-producers there is one 
 lie that I want to bring out into the light. It 
 is one of a dirty battalion of lies, for the brew- 
 ers with their venerable scientists, the distillers 
 with their ^' health-apostles," even the viticul- 
 turists with their parade of poor hectic women, 
 
DRINK AND NATIONAL CRISES 197 
 
 are prolific in false arguments. The one I have 
 in mind, however, is the worst of them all, 
 for it has a grave air of sincerity. It is the 
 argument that '^ the abolition of the liquor 
 traffic will create a financial panic " and, since 
 " a million toilers will lose their jobs," it will 
 create also a labor panic. 
 
 The simplest answer would be a calm, indif- 
 ferent, ethical retort: 
 
 '^Well, what if it did?" 
 
 But, there is an ampler reply, which may find 
 place (with your permission) in another 
 chapter. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 
 
 To abolish alcoholism you have but to stop 
 the manufacture of alcohol. 
 
 But men, you say, will drink in spite of law; 
 in some furtive way they will get their alco- 
 holic poison. Possibly. Probably. There are 
 stern laws against murder, but men kill their 
 fellows. There are laws against theft, but bad 
 men go on stealing. No law succeeds in pro- 
 hibiting the crime against which it is enacted. 
 All it can do is to set that particular crime 
 outside the law and to punish the outlaw. Only 
 when the social environment is favorable to 
 prohibition will prohibition prohibit; only 
 when the social environment is against lynch- 
 ing will lynchers cease to lynch — be the law 
 what it may; only when the social environ- 
 ment is unfavorable to white-slavery will that 
 bad business cease — no matter how repressive 
 
 198 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 199 
 
 a Mann law be enacted. That is self-evident. 
 In these instances, the nation, as exemplified in 
 its laws, is against lynching and against white- 
 slavery. It has not, with all its power, been 
 able to suppress them wholly. Until a clean 
 social environment has been created they will 
 exist, though in an obscurely vicious way. In 
 an imperfect stage of civilization one does 
 not expect a governmental law to prohibit 
 crime — but largely to prevent it and certainly 
 to punish it. A law to prohibit the manufac- 
 ture and sale of alcoholic beverages could be 
 enforced as completely as any other law. 
 
 In two-thirds of the territory of the United 
 States the saloon has been abolished. And this 
 is not an empty territory; it houses fully sixty 
 per cent, of the population. How did these 
 wise and civic-sane citizens get the kind of pro- 
 hibition they have won? They got it in spite 
 of the national government; they won it in 
 local battles in township, county and state; and 
 their mightiest enemy was the Federal Gov- 
 ernment. To-day when they have established 
 local laws of clean-living and sobriety — when 
 they have closed the saloons and barrooms and 
 prohibited the sale of drink, what, think you, 
 
200 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 the government does? Over the heads of the 
 local authorities it issues licenses for the traffic 
 in alcohol. And it uses all the forces of the 
 interstate commerce laws to force the sale of 
 drink in these states which have declared they 
 would fain be sober. Maine is a prohibition 
 state. It forbids the making and selling of 
 alcoholic drinks. Does Washington respect 
 this declaration? In spite of the state — in spite 
 of the will of the people, their royal Will-to- 
 be-Sober — the Federal Government has issued 
 in Maine four hundred and thirty-four retail 
 licenses and has licensed one hundred and 
 eighteen druggists to dispense liquor. That is 
 what " Uncle Sam " has done in Maine in the 
 face of a state's protest. More discreditable is 
 the fact that the Federal Government has 
 issued, in Kansas, licenses to the very criminals 
 — '' boot-leggers " and the like — who have been 
 arrested and convicted for violating the Kansas 
 prohibition law. And in these dry states it is 
 using the United States mails for advertising 
 drink. 
 
 How comes this to pass? 
 
 Washington is the headquarters of the alco- 
 hol forces of the nation. There are mobilized 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 201 
 
 the congressional defenders of drink. Two- 
 thirds of the nation has declared for the aboli- 
 tion of the pandemic plague of drink. In two- 
 thirds of the nation the saloons have been 
 closed. Against the will and purpose of 
 these two-thirds stand the distiller-owned and 
 brewer-fed congressmen. What states do they 
 come from? 
 
 Four states in the union contain more than 
 one-half of the saloons in existence. And these 
 same states, mark you, are the homes of more 
 than one-half of the congressmen who voted in 
 the House of Representatives against national 
 prohibition. And one state took the lead in 
 this battle to thwart the will of the nation. 
 That state was New York, which contains to-day 
 more saloons than all the thirty-six states whose 
 legislatures have the power to ratify and make 
 effective a federal constitutional amendment 
 prohibiting the liquor traffic. 
 
 One-half of the representatives who voted 
 against national prohibition came from the six 
 largest and drunkennest cities in the country — 
 from cities brewer-ruled and distiller-directed. 
 In other words, the final destruction of the 
 liquor traffic has narrowed down to a contest 
 
202 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 with the vicious and immoral voting mobs of 
 the great drink-controlled cities. It is in these 
 cities the distillers and brewers are making 
 their last stand. The drunkard's vote and the 
 corrupt congressman alone stand in the way of 
 the nation's will to be sober. Nothing else — 
 save, of course, the tainted financial interests 
 behind this traffic in poison. 
 
 In Russia you had a government which held 
 in its hand the entire business of drink — sale 
 and production; when the nation's life was at 
 stake it closed an iron hand and throttled the 
 bad business. In spite of protest — in spite 
 of the outcries of the drink-bought press and 
 drink-bought agitators. In the United States 
 the situation is reversed, for it is the people 
 that is straining forward towards sober living, 
 while the national government — by its system 
 of federal licenses and mail-carried drink — is 
 trying to whip the nation back into drunken- 
 ness. 
 
 So stands the case. 
 
 What is certain is that in the end the people 
 will have their way. The progress is steady. 
 Already a " wet and dry " map of the United 
 States shows that two-thirds of the territory 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 203 
 
 has been written over with state or local enact- 
 ments of prohibition. And the movement goes 
 on? It cannot be stopped. Public opinion has 
 spoken. What the war-startled nations did in 
 their peril will be done in the United States — 
 in the slower ways of peace. 
 
 Against the will of the nation stands only one 
 force: It is the dirty army of those who make 
 a profit out of alcohol — and their dirtier political 
 hirelings. 
 
 Who makes that profit? 
 
 You are a reasonable man; and by grace of 
 your sane reason you know that there is no profit 
 in the business for anyone save for those who 
 make and sell the stuff and for the gamblers, 
 prostitutes and parasites whose profits come 
 from the drink-fuddled citizens. You have 
 heard a great deal of the losses that will fall 
 upon brewer and distiller, saloon-keeper and 
 the owner of property used by the drink trade; 
 I do not fancy you are much perturbed at 
 the thought of these losses. You have heard 
 before a similar wail from the red-light dis- 
 trict, for the white-slaver whines as whined 
 the black-slaver of Jamaica. Money loss in 
 the face of moral gain is negligible; in a clash 
 
204 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 between ethics and economics it is the latter 
 that must go to the wall. 
 
 But with the whine of the liquor dealers there 
 goes a threat — a threat of national economic 
 disaster. They hold in hand, they assert, ^^ the 
 most disastrous panic in all history," which they 
 can loose upon the country if it goes against 
 them. 
 
 It is a serious thing, that threat. .France 
 heard it when she banned absinthe; Russia 
 heard it when she prohibited the sale and manu- 
 facture of all alcoholic drink; it was inevitable 
 that it should be heard in this country. 
 
 Let us hear the threat. At least it is the 
 sort of thing one can answer. The whine is 
 more difficult to meet — with its specious plea 
 for " human liberty," for man's " inalienable 
 right " to break any social law of which he 
 does not approve. A whine is an illogical emo- 
 tional appeal; but a threat to create an eco- 
 nomic disaster can be met. 
 
 II 
 
 There is an official spokesman of alcohol. 
 His title has a full-fronted pomposity about it, 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 205 
 
 which should not be abbreviated. Joseph De- 
 bar is the " Secretary of the National Whole- 
 sale Liquor Dealers' Association of America " — 
 a ten-word pomposity. I shall let him state his 
 threat and argument in his own words. 
 
 Thus: 
 
 " Put as briefly as possible, the different 
 effects of nation-wide prohibition may be stated 
 as follows: 
 
 " Abolition of business representing a capi- 
 talization estimated at from $3,000,000,000 to 
 $5,000,000,000. 
 
 " Absolute loss of a large proportion of the 
 assets of this industry and tremendous depre- 
 ciation in value of the remainder. 
 
 ^^ Closing up of over two thousand four hun- 
 dred plants manufacturing distilled, malt and 
 vinous liquors, having a capital, by the 1909 
 census, of $831,000,000, purchasing raw mate- 
 rials valued at $169,000,000 annually and turn- 
 ing out a product valued at over $630,000,000 
 annually. 
 
 " Closing up of over two hundred and three 
 thousand retail liquor establishments with an 
 investment running up into many millions of 
 dollars. 
 
2o6 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 ^^ Bankruptcy for thousands of these manu- 
 facturers, wholesalers and retailers, who will 
 find themselves facing a tremendous loss on 
 property, the value of which is either wiped 
 out or greatly depreciated and a large propor- 
 tion of whose debtors in the same line of busi- 
 ness will be unable to meet bills due. 
 
 " Switching thousands of these dealers to 
 other lines of industry, where they will come 
 into competition with their brains and what is 
 left of their capital with manufacturers and 
 merchants already in those fields. 
 
 ^' Loss to railroads of the country of revenue 
 on traffic running up into millions of dollars, 
 netting them a considerable percentage of their 
 income from freight. According to the United 
 States Statistical Abstract for 1913, the total 
 movement of manufactures of the wine, whisky 
 and beer industries in 191 2 amounted to over 
 seven million tons, or two and a half per cent, 
 of the total traffic of all manufacturing indus- 
 tries of the country. This does not take into 
 consideration the shipment of grain and other 
 raw materials to the distilleries, breweries and 
 wineries, nor does it take cognizance of by- 
 products like dried feed, which, when shipped 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 207 
 
 away, represents from twenty to forty per cent, 
 of the bulk of the grain going to these plants; 
 nor does it take notice of shipments between 
 wholesalers and retailers and retail dealers and 
 customers. 
 
 '^ Loss of billions of dollars to wholesale 
 grocers, hotel-owners, restaurant-keepers, drug- 
 gists, both wholesale and retail, most of whom 
 ordinarily are not classed by the public with 
 liquor industries." 
 
 And Mr. Debar goes on to argue that there 
 would be " billions of dollars " of loss to barrel- 
 makers, bottle-makers, printers, truck-manufac- 
 turers, builders, yeast-makers; that the millions 
 worth of grain and fruit used by the liquor- 
 makers would go to waste — that everyone from 
 the bag-man to the farm laborer would suffer 
 financially, since brewers and distillers would 
 have no money to pass on to them. And he 
 notes : 
 
 ^' Loss of $230,000,000 annually in internal 
 revenue and over $18,000,000 in customs reve- 
 nue; a grand total of nearly $250,000,000, over 
 one-third of the total annual income from all 
 sources. 
 
 " Necessity of raising this vast sum in other 
 
208 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 directions. The difficulty of this will be ap- 
 parent to all who recall the stress attendant 
 upon the imposition a short time back of a 
 $1,000,000,000 war tax." 
 
 Gloomiest of all is his apprehension of the 
 cost of the maintenance of '' a vast army of 
 United States officials to enforce the law " — 
 which is the prettiest argument ever advanced. 
 I may suggest that one might merely take the 
 police now occupied with the crimes and crimi- 
 nals, created by drink, and set them to watch 
 the liquor-dealers who did not obey the law. 
 There would be plenty of police for the work, 
 since it is a statistical fact that eighty-four per 
 cent, of their work is due to alcohol-begotten 
 crime. They would have plenty of time on 
 their hands to look after the '^ enforcement 
 of the law " against dealing in liquor — ample 
 time, Mr. Debar. And I am not of the opinion 
 that the nation would grudge the price it paid 
 for that sort of police protection. 
 
 Read on: 
 
 '^ Loss to the state of many millions; to coun- 
 tries of other millions and to incorporated 
 places having a population of two thousand 
 five hundred and over, of $51,955,001, a 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 209 
 
 grand total running up into the hundreds of 
 millions every year in liquor license and tax 
 receipts. 
 
 " Greater burden of direct taxation to fall 
 upon all the population instead of upon those 
 who now voluntarily pay the tax indirectly 
 when they see fit to purchase liquors. 
 
 " How many banks would be forced to the 
 wall along with the crash in other directions no 
 man would undertake to say. How many mil- 
 lions of unemployed would walk the streets for 
 months and possibly years there is no way of 
 figuring." 
 
 There is the argument, put as strongly as it 
 can be put by the shrewd, alarmed secretary 
 of the traffickers in alcohol. When you analyze 
 it you see it is only a threat — a money threat. 
 In lesser proportion it is precisely' the argument 
 of the '' red-light district," which showed how 
 house property would suffer if the law were 
 enforced — how thousands of employees would 
 be thrown out of work and how the neigh- 
 boring vendors of food and musk and rouge 
 and silk kimonos would suffer. The argu- 
 ment of Mr. Debar is quintessentially the 
 same. 
 
210 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 And it smells bad. 
 
 Unclean as the argument is — immoral as it 
 is — it has been effective in terrifying the voter, 
 especially the laboring man. So men of fore- 
 sight and intellectual probity have deemed it 
 worth answering. They have pulled to pieces 
 its fallacy. They have carefully abstracted 
 from it what was true and sought and found 
 a remedy. Indeed, a group of important soci- 
 ologists, of which Mr. Charles Stelzle is the 
 head, has made a comprehensive survey of the 
 economical aspects of the liquor problem. As 
 clearly as Mr. Debar, they recognize that 
 " there may be dislocation of a temporary kind 
 in the labor world because of the change " — 
 the words are Mr. Roosevelt's words — and they 
 have formulated a plan to meet it. 
 
 Three things they set themselves to do: 
 
 To demonstrate that the abolition of the 
 liquor traffic will not create a labor panic. 
 
 To assist in establishing temporary labor 
 exchanges to find work for those losing their 
 jobs through prohibitory legislation. 
 
 To promote the organization of adequate so- 
 cial centers as substitutes for the saloon. 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 211 
 
 III 
 
 First the demonstration; and I would ask you 
 to read carefully this victorious reply to Mr. 
 Debar's money threat; it was written by Mr. 
 Charles Stelzle and printed (for five million 
 readers) in Mr. Hearst's newspapers: 
 
 ^' The argument that the abolition of the 
 liquor traffic will create a financial panic is 
 based entirely upon the absurd proposition that 
 if the liquor dealers fail to get the money now 
 spent for beer and whisky nobody else will 
 get it. 
 
 ^' It is assumed that if a man doesn't spend 
 a dollar for booze, he will throw that dollar 
 into the sewer or into some kind of a bottom- 
 less pit, instead of using it to purchase some 
 other commodity, which will do good instead of 
 harm, which will have a permanent value, and 
 which will give the workingmen of the coun- 
 try more work, more wages and greater pros- 
 perity every way than if the same amount of 
 money were spent for beer and whisky. 
 
 " Every workingman knows that we are not 
 suffering from over-production, but from under- 
 consumption. He is painfully conscious of the 
 
212 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 fact that he doesn't live as well as he should in 
 comparison with others who do not work as 
 hard as he does, and that he cannot give his 
 family the benefits which they deserve. There- 
 fore, it will not injure him particularly if the 
 brewery and distillery owners were to put their 
 ^ brains and what is left of their capital ' when 
 the liquor business is destroyed into the pro- 
 duction of materials which will give him more 
 of the comforts of life here and now, and less 
 of the torments both here and hereafter. 
 
 " As for the ' poor farmer ' who would suf- 
 fer so grievously, according to the defender of 
 the saloon, because the brewers and distillers 
 would fail to buy his grain and grapes, his 
 apples and cherries — there is no fear that he 
 will buy fewer automobiles and less farm ma- 
 chinery, and all the other modern conveniences 
 which he now enjoys, because somebody else 
 will buy his apples and cherries, his grain and 
 grapes — besides, economists and farm experts 
 are even now afraid that the American farmer 
 w^ill soon be unable to raise enough grain ade- 
 quately to supply his country. 
 
 ^' Regarding the railroad man who would 
 no longer handle the ^ 2.5 per cent, of the total 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 213 
 
 traffic of all manufacturing industries of the 
 country/ which the liquor business now fur- 
 nishes — nobody doubts for a single moment that 
 the railroad man will get as much business and 
 as much money from the transfer of a given 
 amount of grain, whether that grain is shipped 
 to a brewer or a baker. As for the transpor- 
 tation of the finished product, as well as the 
 raw materials which the liquor industry now 
 furnishes, other industries which would bene- 
 fit through the transfer of trade from liquor 
 to some other commodity would undoubtedly 
 supply as much business for the railroad man 
 as the brewers and distillers do." 
 
 The harshest edge of the liquor argument is 
 turned towards the workingman. The liquor 
 business, Mr. Debar avers, is the fifth in im- 
 portance in the United States; and its aboli- 
 tion would throw out of work one-fifth of the 
 nation's labor, you are to assume. The sug- 
 gestion makes for misconception. There are 
 6,616,046 workers in the industries of the coun- 
 try. Of these only 62,920 are employed in the 
 liquor industry — only about one per cent. 
 
 " Taking five leading industries in this coun- 
 try — namely, textiles and the finished products, 
 
214 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 iron and steel and their products, lumber and its 
 manufactures, leather and its finished products, 
 and paper and printing, and comparing them 
 with the liquor business (including the malting 
 industry) with regard to the number of wage- 
 earners employed, capital invested and wages 
 paid, we arrive at some interesting conclusions. 
 Based upon the figures found in the Abstract 
 of Statistics of Manufacture, we discover that 
 the number of wage-earners for each one mil- 
 lion dollars invested in each of these industries 
 was as follows: Liquor, 77; Textiles, 578; Iron, 
 284; Lumber, 579; Leather, 469; and Paper, 
 
 367-" 
 
 In plainer words, every million dollars in- 
 vested in the drink industry gives employment 
 to only seventy-seven men — while a similar sum 
 invested in lumber, for example, gives a living 
 to five hundred and seventy-nine men. 
 
 What is all this boast about what the liquor 
 industry is doing for labor? The ratio of wages 
 paid to the workers in proportion to the capital 
 invested is so criminally small that it should 
 not stand for an hour — in the face of this so- 
 ciological investigation which Mr. Stelzle and 
 his associates have made. In the textile Indus- 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 215 
 
 tries — and that fairly represents all the other 
 industries — the ratio of wages paid to capi- 
 tal invested is 23.9 per cent.; a fair ratio; 
 in the liquor business the ratio is 5.6 per 
 cent. 
 
 It is not much that the laboring man gets out 
 of the millions invested in alcohol. Small in- 
 deed is the financial harm he would suffer were 
 it taken away. 
 
 What of the two billions the country spends 
 a year in drink? 
 
 Simply this : Were it spent for food and cloth- 
 ing, it would give employment to nearly eight 
 times as many workers, who would receive col- 
 lectively five and a half times as much in 
 wages. 
 
 So absurd is that threat of a '' labor panic." 
 In fact, the only workers who would be thrown 
 out into a society in which there was no demand 
 for their work would be the bona-fide brewers, 
 maltsters, distillers and rectifiers, whose occu- 
 pations are peculiar to the liquor industries; 
 they would have to find new trades ; but, in all, 
 there are only fifteen thousand of them — and 
 they could easily be fitted into a sober com- 
 monwealth. 
 
2i6 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 One point more: the loss to the state of the 
 tax in the making and selling of drink. 
 
 "All choice implies loss;" and over against 
 this loss to the state there should be set the 
 gain, which would come from the abolition of 
 the crime, pauperism and insanity which is 
 caused directly and indirectly by drink. In- 
 deed, the loss in revenue, even were it one- 
 third of the nation's income — as in Russia — 
 could be lightly borne by a nation that had 
 regained the sober way of life. 
 
 The saloon is an economic loss. There is 
 no profit in alcohol for the laborer or for the 
 state. The only profit goes to those who manu- 
 facture it and dispense it — to them and their 
 hangers-on, the Falstaff army of wasters and 
 criminals, the vice-ridden and the morally im- 
 potent. Nor is this evil profit a thing that may 
 not be touched; neither law nor equity nor 
 convention has drawn round it a magic circle 
 of protection. The traffic in alcohol is inher- 
 ently criminal. Every man who has engaged 
 in the traffic has done so with the knowledge 
 that the state has reserved the right to abolish 
 it when and how it pleases. 
 
 It is a maxim of law that impossibilities shall 
 
ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 217 
 
 be required of no one; I am, therefore, under 
 no obligation to convince the traffickers in drink 
 of the dark fact that they are poisoning the 
 springs of our national life. Of more impor- 
 tance is the fact that the nation has been con- 
 vinced and, by vote and enactment, seventy-one 
 per cent, of the nation has recorded its convic- 
 tion. But what I trust I have made clear, 
 even to the brewer and distiller, to vendor and 
 divekeeper, is that their threat of " a national 
 economic disaster" is an empty menace; and if, 
 by any chance, the disaster does fall it will 
 fall exactly where it should fall — on them alone. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 MEASURES remedial; 
 
 And this shall be a short chapter; for we 
 have nearly reached the end of our little journey 
 in the highways and byways of alcohol. 
 
 The danger in studying a question so vital — 
 a subject with such a surge and swing of emo- 
 tion in it — is the tendency to become enthusi- 
 astic and slop about. This is especially true 
 when one's concern is with the individual and 
 not with the larger and colder aspects of na- 
 tional reform. 
 
 Civilization after all is a fight; and while 
 this fight against alcohol is humanity's fight, 
 it is also — you know it bitterly — a battle for 
 the life of many a man who is dear to you, 
 of many a woman you love and for the life 
 of the boy at your hearth; that is why the heart 
 cries aloud in it. And thence come the wild 
 emotionalism, the large, enveloping shallow- 
 
 218 
 
MEASURES REMEDIAL 219 
 
 ness, which have confused and distorted the 
 subject. All sorts of imaginative postulates 
 have been set up. There has been strident and 
 meaningless agitation against facts. You can 
 understand the passionate anger of those who 
 have been injured by drink; you can appreciate 
 the sterner and more dangerous anger of the 
 psychologist, the physiologist and the sociologist 
 who have traced a major part of the nation's 
 crime, insanity and degeneration to alcohol; but 
 you find it difficult to study fair-mindedly the 
 arguments brought forward by the apologists 
 for drink. And, for my part, I admit that it is 
 not easy to listen cold-bloodedly to the argu- 
 ments of the viticulturists and the vendors of 
 alcohol. Their skill in darkening facts — their 
 shifty and greedy apologies for the traffic that 
 brings them wealth — make for anger rather 
 than acquiescence. 
 
 And so, in discussing the alcohol question, 
 the besetting danger is that of making a noise — 
 of preaching and declaiming — instead of taking 
 it as a matter for scientific research and for 
 adjustment by scientific authority. 
 
 I trust that in this little book I have gone 
 round that peril. I am as convinced as you 
 
220 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 can be of the wild objectionableness of mere 
 denunciation. Doubtless at one time it was 
 necessary. Honor should be paid the men of 
 days gone by — the men of to-day — who stormed 
 against the evils of drink. Many of them 
 were great men, stamped with the seal of fierce, 
 swift and terrible eloquence. But their day has 
 gone by. The emotional way of fighting drink 
 is obsolete. 
 
 The reason is that the hour of controversial 
 issues is past. 
 
 There is no longer any dispute as to the 
 main and primary facts in the case against 
 alcohol. 
 
 With a thoroughness of intellectual treatment, 
 which none can gainsay, our masters in physi- 
 ology, sociology and economics have pro- 
 nounced judgment. 
 
 The physiologist informs you that alcohol, 
 even in the smallest quantity, is a poison, which 
 begins its bad work of degeneration on the 
 highest functional levels of the brain — ^which 
 destroys its man from the top downwards. You 
 have read what he has to say, for I have tried 
 to make it both clear and emphatic. But let me 
 add one fact. It will show you how even the 
 
MEASURES REMEDIAL 221 
 
 conservative medical men have broken away 
 from an old habit of respect for alcohol as a 
 " drug." Hitherto whisky, brandy and the 
 like figured officially as '' drugs " in the United 
 States Pharmacopoeia, which is the authorita- 
 tive list of medicinal preparations recognized 
 by physicians. The list is now being revised 
 and the committee in charge has voted to re- 
 move from it whisky and brandy. Neither of 
 them will be used in the future in making up 
 medicines. The physicians, as you see, have 
 lined up with modern science. 
 
 The physiologist has declared against alco- 
 hol; and the men of social science have found 
 in alcohol the cause — the very causa causans 
 — of the greater part of the nation's pauper- 
 ism, crime and degeneration. And lastly comes 
 the economist, demonstrating that " the saloon 
 represents an economic loss." 
 
 The case, you note, is tolerably complete. 
 
 Modern science — always skeptical, always 
 restrained in judgment — has investigated and 
 pronounced: alcohol is a poison for the indi- 
 vidual and for the state. It is a pest like any 
 other, and should be fought as one fights a 
 pest. In this pronouncement of science there 
 
222 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 is no weak and untrained vehemence; there is 
 the cold and steely veracity of scientific state- 
 ment. You cannot get away from it. It is 
 plain as a rock — as a fact. What common 
 sense saw long ago science has affirmed in words 
 unmistakable. 
 
 And the nation is awake to the truth. 
 
 This is the immense implication of the local 
 enactments against drink which are driving 
 alcohol out of two-thirds of the territory of 
 the United States. It means the nation has 
 learned the truth about alcohol and that it is 
 using the makeshift weapons it can lay hands 
 on to fight it. The remedy is not a perfect one; 
 so long as the Federal Government does not 
 collaborate it will remain imperfect; but it 
 implies that at last the people have broken 
 the bad inertia of the habit which puts up 
 with an evil because it cannot be wholly 
 destroyed. 
 
 There is something almost pathetic in this 
 struggle of a nation to free itself from alco- 
 holism. You may study it from one end of 
 the country to the other. Everywhere you see 
 the Will-to-be-Sober asserting itself — oftenest in 
 ways irrational and pathetically grotesque. One 
 
MEASURES REMEDIAL 223 
 
 is to post up in public the names of those who 
 drink too much for social quiet; another is to 
 hold the drink-seller responsible for the pauper- 
 ism and crime of his clients; while in a third 
 state there has been built a " dipping-vat " 
 for the ducking of drunkards; and there are 
 many such grotesque attempts to palliate the 
 evil done by drink. It is not by such make- 
 shifts that a sober civilization will become pos- 
 sible. They make only for sadness and deri- 
 sion. 
 
 What, then, is the remedy — and I mean a 
 remedy, possible of application, in the exist- 
 ing stage of evolution? 
 
 For mark this: Man is not perfected; he is 
 something that is trying to be. The race is 
 working itself out. It is going somewhere. 
 And through war and plague and alcoholism 
 evolution is working exactly as it is working 
 in its interlocking atoms that whirl and quiver 
 at the very heart of matter. In human nature 
 it is working to make man more humane; it 
 is striving to make a better race; and man's 
 first duty is to help on that evolution. But 
 evolution does not advance by jumps. It goes 
 forward by steps and degrees. You cannot 
 
224 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 expect to get any remedy that will safeguard 
 the individual against alcoholism or sweep it 
 out of the state. That is what should be done; 
 that is the ideal end; and it is what science 
 declares must in the end be done. To-day any 
 practicable remedy must fit the times; it must 
 be in harmony with our stage of national and 
 individual evolution. I have shown you what 
 therapeutic and psychologic way there is of re- 
 generating the individual victim of drink, 
 whether he be the conspicuous spree-victim or 
 that masked victim who fancies he can drink 
 and be sober. 
 
 And now comes the question: What can the 
 state do to alcohol? 
 
 You have seen how Russia, quietly and in 
 time of peace, took over the entire manufacture 
 and sale of alcohol, so that when the time of 
 crisis came she could strangle it with her auto- 
 cratic hands. There is a lesson there. State 
 prohibition is a step on the right road; local 
 option is admirable; but one and the other are 
 defective so long as the Federal Government 
 refuses its collaboration. Only the power at 
 the top can fight so big an evil. A federal mo- 
 nopoly of the manufacture and sale of alcohol 
 
MEASURES REMEDIAL 225 
 
 is the certain remedy for the worst evils of the 
 whole, bad business. It would insure against 
 the awful adulteration which is to-day uni- 
 versal; it would shut up every public drinking 
 place — for it should dispense alcohol only in 
 sealed packages a qui le droit; and when the 
 hour struck — when public opinion got itself 
 heard in the houses of congress — it would close 
 its hand and throttle the entire iniquitous trade. 
 It could destroy this gift-quelle of a nation's 
 degradation with one gesture and one act. That 
 is an ultimate ideal. I do not say that gov- 
 ernment control of the making and selling of 
 alcohol would stop (as one stops a train) the 
 evil of alcoholism. There are forged bank- 
 notes and false coins abroad in spite of the 
 fact that the government issues the money of 
 the land. There would still be fraudulent 
 liquor and furtive alcoholism; but the ban 
 would be on them and the law could act. It 
 would not stop the sale and the drinking of 
 alcohol, you say; no, it would not stop it; but 
 it would make it more difficult for the drinker 
 to get drunk — a distinct gain. Moreover, to a 
 great extent, it would prevent the making of 
 drunkards. There would be sporadic drunk- 
 
226 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 ards — whereof the alienist has spoken and for 
 whom the asylum waits — even as there are 
 sporadic murderers; but the state would not 
 be in the dreadful business of making them. 
 Its object would be to guard this poison and 
 keep it from the race. What the alcohol indus- 
 try is doing to-day is precisely the opposite. 
 Like every other industry it is tempted by profit 
 to produce more and more; and so it must force 
 it into reluctant markets at home and abroad. 
 While it sends cargoes of rum to Africa, it 
 forces on the sale at home by every hypnotic 
 suggestion of advertisement — by every pre- 
 tense of health-making and food-value — 
 by every temptation it can invent from 
 the music of the tavern to the dance of the 
 cabaret. 
 
 Where the devil can't go himself he sends 
 a woman. 
 
 Where the distiller and brewer could not sell 
 his poison unaided he called in the poor, 
 painted, unhappy girls of the night to brisken 
 up his trade. He has produced such torrents of 
 drink that he cannot get it sold in normal ways 
 of supply and demand; so he has called to his 
 aid the lie that looks like an advertisement 
 
MEASURES REMEDIAL 227 
 
 and the dreadful collaboration of sinful women. 
 He has taken vice into partnership. This is his 
 way of forcing drink on a nation that would 
 fain be sober. Now all this wretched business 
 of temptation would be halted were the gov- 
 ernment to take over alcohol — as France has 
 taken tobacco. Such a system would not take 
 away man's liberty (of which the brewers are 
 so jealous), but it would put an end to the 
 present method of coaxing, forcing and dra- 
 gooning him into vice. It would indeed give 
 man back his liberty — his essential right to 
 stand for freedom of mind and body. It would 
 in an hour destroy the drink-compelling en- 
 vironment which the brewers and distillers 
 have created in their dives and brothels, in 
 their cabarets and dance-halls, in their bar- 
 rooms of gilt and glass. 
 
 I say that state control is only a stage on 
 the road to a nation's regeneration; but it is 
 an etape that has to be gone through, if one 
 may take example from other nations which are 
 at almost the same degree of national evolution. 
 Once the state has got the traffic out of the 
 hands of the conscienceless traffickers who hold 
 it now, a sterner reformation can begin. It 
 
228 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 can stop at once the poisonous adulteration on 
 which the distillers and brewers found their 
 profits. It can strip the drinking place of its 
 infamous vice appeal. It can hold the evil 
 down until such time as the voice of the nation 
 can make itself heard over the clamor of the 
 interests that fatten on drink — and over the 
 oratory of the corrupt and purchased poli- 
 ticians. 
 
 A step on the road: I do not say I am 
 against any method of fighting alcohol in the 
 nation; I do not say I am against any of the 
 devised forms of prohibition and abolition for 
 which earnest men are striving; I distinctly 
 say I am for them all — for any way of destroy- 
 ing the pandemic plague of alcoholism; but 
 the first necessary step is to give the govern- 
 ment (which is, or should be, and may be the 
 people) full control. It is a method which has 
 been tried; and more than any other it has 
 succeeded. It offers the fairest hope and the 
 greatest certainty. 
 
 Why should the government issue a license 
 to any man to make or sell alcohol? 
 
 If the government is to issue any license, 
 it should be a license to the individual who has 
 
MEASURES REMEDIAL 229 
 
 proved that he can safely drink his alcohol — 
 and that revocable license should be issued to him 
 only so long as he is at the safety point. When 
 he can no longer drink and be sober — this side 
 of social injury — the license should be w^ith- 
 drawn. Thus, his cherished liberty to poison 
 himself would be in his own custody. He 
 would forfeit it only when his progressive de- 
 generation had made him obnoxious to family, 
 friends, enemies and the community. 
 
 The drink question is a national question; 
 it is a question of the nation's health — of its 
 welfare and of its life. And the nation should 
 settle it. Not here and there; not in scat- 
 tered efforts toward local abatement of the evil; 
 the remedy should be national; the state should 
 take the whole bad business into its hands 
 that it may — when the hour strikes — stran- 
 gle it. 
 
 An hour that has not yet risen over our 
 dark intellectual horizon? 
 
 The dawn is nearer, I think, than you fancy. 
 The public mind is angrily awake. New la- 
 borers are going forth to a new seed-time, 
 whereof the harvest shall yet be. 
 
 And then — just a moment — who is the worst 
 
230 DRINK AND BE SOBER 
 
 enemy of the immediacy of this reform, for 
 which you and I are looking so largely? 
 
 Believe me, he is the man for whom this 
 little book is written; he is not the rowdy 
 drunkard, already marked with the plain stig- 
 mata of alcoholic dissolution; he is, rather, 
 that smiling, dangerous man who can drink and 
 be sober, thank Heaven! and who, checking 
 alcoholic degeneration in himself, passes on a 
 deadlier degeneration to his daughters and his 
 sons. He is in the forefront for all the argu- 
 ments for drink. And proudly he poses there 
 and does not see the ignominy of his posi- 
 tion. 
 
 How should he see? 
 
 Already he is poisoned atop; morally he is 
 blind-drunk. And mentally he is darkening 
 into irrationality. 
 
 Dear man, you can drink and be sober on 
 the physical level, but you cannot drink and 
 be good and you cannot drink and be wise. 
 
 When I had written this sentence Oliver 
 Herford leaned over my shoulder and read it. 
 
 " I see what you mean," he said, " even the 
 man who drinks soberly is a fool." 
 
MEASURES REMEDIAL 231 
 
 " To an extent — he is mentally impaired." 
 " You shouldn't be too hard on him," said 
 Mr. Herford, ^^ when he puts an enemy into 
 his mouth to steal away his brains, it is only 
 a petty larceny he is guilty of, anyway." 
 A thought I leave with you.